6 minute read
HOPING FOR LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE
Stephen Lidbetter
Ever noticed that people always have dreams? Something innate within us moves us to set our sights on what could be—the athlete who dreams of the gold, the artist who dreams of being world-famous, and the Oxford student who dreams of the first, the blue or the spouse. Because there’s something coming, there has to be—or so we tell ourselves. Life’s alright now, but once I have that first, I’ll be set for life. Once I get a blue, I’ll be accepted. Once I find a relationship, I won’t feel quite so alone.
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And of course, right now we’re all dreaming of the day when lockdown ends, when there’s a coronavirus vaccine, and when we can actually see our friends and families again—Zoom is a poor substitute for being with those we love. In fact, a large part of what makes lockdown so hard is that loss of human connection. The isolation and loneliness that comes with being indefinitely separated from others gives rise to a genuine sense of hopelessness. And so, we do what we always do—we look to the future. We read about the COVID-19 vaccine trials, we start guessing about when lockdown will end, and we plan the party we’re going to have as soon as large gatherings are allowed. We dream about seeing people again.
Even the most introverted of us aren’t very good at being alone. We all have a deep longing for emotional connection—the kind of connection that just can’t be found on a video call. There is a universal desire to find love and acceptance, and if you don’t believe me, then just look at the messages of our songs and our films. In fact, it seems to me that this is the fundamental hope of the human heart: the hope of love and acceptance. And that’s why it hurts so much when these hopes aren’t realised. Unrequited love, heartbreak, and rejection are such painful experiences precisely because we are let down by the very thing in which we had hoped to find fulfilment. Ultimately, we all long to belong, and we love to be loved.
But love doesn’t come easily. Someone may think they love me if they don’t really know me—but then it’s not me that they love. True love requires genuine knowledge, and that scares us. To allow myself to be truly loved, I have to make myself vulnerable, and therefore allow someone to get to know the ‘real me’ underneath it all. And of course, the fear is that when someone sees what I’m really like, they won’t like me very much at all. This fear leads us to draw back from intimacy, and to hide from the very people we hope to find love from—because if they knew all the darkest things I’d done, said and thought, they’d never look at me in the same way again. Better to present a lovable façade than to reveal my unlovable self.
It’s possible that I’ve spent too much time listening to Spotify’s ‘All Out 10s’ playlist recently, but in my view, this whole sentiment is beautifully and hauntingly captured by the lyrics of Imagine Dragons’ song ‘Demons’:
We push people away to prevent them from seeing the darkness that lies in our hearts. In fact, I sometimes think we hide even from ourselves. How much time and energy do we invest in telling ourselves that we aren’t so bad really, or that we’re at least better than the other people around us? That nobody’s perfect, and we should just learn to love our imperfections, and find people who will do the same?
Except, of course, they’re still imperfections. And deep down we know that the platitude ‘nobody’s perfect’ can never honestly rescue us from our insecurities. What we so deeply hope for is someone who will acknowledge our imperfections, and rather than pretending that everything’s fine, will love us as we are in spite of them. We long with all our heart to be fully known, and fully loved.
So, is this most fundamental hope of ours destined to be frustrated? Are we condemned always to live either with the emptiness of being loved without being known, or with the loneliness of being known but not loved? Wonderfully, I’ve found that this hope is not in fact empty, because in the person of Jesus Christ there is one who offers us a love that is genuinely unconditional.
Jesus doesn’t lie to us or tell us what we want to hear. He knows of the darkness inside, the thoughts we’re glad no one knows about, and the words we regret saying as soon as they leave our mouths. He sees all this, and he acutely diagnoses our problem. The problem lies in our hearts, he says—and it is out of our hearts that come all the things which defile us.
So Jesus sees this sickness of heart—but he doesn’t run from us in the way we might expect. Instead, he offers himself to us. Why? Because, in his words, it is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick. Jesus has not come to call the righteous, but sinners. He understands exactly the condition of our hearts— he knows us better than we know ourselves—and yet he loves us completely. And Jesus promises to heal our hearts because Jesus himself is the cure.
It is this healing that Jesus purchases for us as at the cost of his own life. As Jesus is nailed to a cross to die, he wins for us the possibility of a relationship with him. By his death and resurrection, he makes it possible for sick hearts to know and receive him, and so to find healing. We take one look at the darkness within us and expect Jesus to send us away empty-handed. But instead, his arms are nailed wide open at the cross, inviting us to come to him and find the love of which we have always dreamed. Knowing that he has accepted us makes it that much easier to love and be loved by others: we no longer depend entirely on their approval for our security.
Do you know that deep, deep hope for love and acceptance? I believe that Jesus is the one in whom that particularly human longing finds its fulfilment. We are constantly searching for it apart from him, but as Augustine says, our hearts were made for Jesus and they are restless until they find their rest in him. Even today, Jesus invites us all in to know his love and acceptance. Real hope is to be found at his cross—as we come to him and let him make our hearts new, we find in him the true love that we’ve always hoped for.
Steve is a second year PPE student at Worcester. He enjoys anything to do with football, and is still dreaming of the day when QPR return to the Premier League. He also wonders whether recent efforts to teach himself the guitar are a reflection of his abilities as a teacher, or as a pupil.
