Tag Archives: love

Radiant Love

We have heard people talk about letting your light shine. I mean, there’s even a song that Sunday school children learn, “This Little Light of Mine,” that comes complete with hand movements.

I was thinking the other day about what that light really is. Some Bible verses describe it as the gospel or as truth. Other verses use it to describe holiness, purity, or just exposure of anything currently hidden in the dark. The more that I thought about it, though, I came to realize that, ultimately, it describes the presence of God. God is truth and holiness and purity. God is light.

Letting our light shine is letting God’s presence shine through, to radiate from us.

That made me think of Moses. In Exodus 34:29, it says, “When Moses came down from Mt Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord.”

His face was radiant. Being in God’s presence made Moses’ face radiate light.

In our own way, we can do the same. We can allow the presence of God to shine from within. We can radiate any number of God’s qualities, be it truth or holiness or joy. But, I think the most important thing we can radiate is love.

1 Corinthians 13 culminates in verse 13: “So now these three remain – faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.” Love is the greatest. It is what we are supposed to do. It is what we are supposed to be.

The Greatest Commandment is about love. The second greatest commandment is about love. The new commandment that Jesus gave before His death is about love.

Why? Why this fixation with love?

Because God so loved the world.

Because God is love.

Because love is greater than even faith and hope.

It seems pretty obvious that God cares a whole lot about love. Him loving us. Us loving Him. Us loving each other. It is His defining trait. It should be our defining trait, too.

1 John 4:12 tells us that no one has ever seen God, but that if we love one another, then He abides in us. They can’t see Him, but they can see Him in us. They can catch a glimpse of God when they see us radiate love.

But, that only happens if God abides in us. We have to allow Him to fill us and shine through us. Can you do that? Can you let God in to the point that you are filled with His love? What about letting it shine out of you? Moses covered his face when it was radiant because it made others uncomfortable. Can you keep the veil off and expose your radiance?

Both acts require vulnerability. It is not easy to let God in. It is not easy to let His presence be exposed in you.

Both acts require trust. If you are going to let God come in and fill you up with His presence, you have to trust Him. You also have to trust Him to carry you through when you step forth with your light fully shining.

Both acts require someone to get uncomfortable. It can make you uncomfortable to let God be such a dominant presence within you. It can make you uncomfortable to feel exposed without a veil. It can definitely make other people uncomfortable when they experience this kind of radiant love coming from you.

But, despite those challenges, we have to remember that both acts also result in something better than we currently have. They lead you to a better you. They lead you to better relationships. They lead you to a better future.

2 Corinthians 3:18 says, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”

I love that verse. God is inviting us into relationship with Him. He is saying, just turn and take off that veil, and let me in. As we do that, we are being transformed into the very image upon which we gaze. But, it is a steady transformation. It isn’t done in one shot. It is done from one degree to the next.

I just picture myself standing there fully exposed as I bask in God’s presence, totally unaware that the longer I remain there, that I am becoming the very thing upon which I gaze. In His presence, we are not left unchanged.

He is filling us and making us radiant.

We have to remember, though, that this light isn’t something we generate on our own. It is the presence of God abiding within us. It is a chance for us to be radiant – and not just any kind of radiance, we get to be radiant love.

Imagine what you could be like if you let God in and became radiant love.

Imagine what your relationships would be like.

Imagine what your life would be like.

Make that your intention this week – embracing radiant love that comes from letting God in and taking your veil off.

Whoa, That Lovin’ Feeling

“Bring back that lovin’ feeling ‘cause it’s gone… gone… gone. Whoa-oh-whoa-oh-whoa.”

If the lyrics above aren’t bringing the song to mind, just picture a bunch of Air Force fly-boys singing it in Top Gun. Who doesn’t love the Righteous Brothers, right?

But, what do you do when life imitates art and you actually have lost that lovin’ feeling?

Perhaps you want to get it back. Perhaps you don’t. The truth of the matter is that you just don’t feel it anymore. You look at your spouse and the twitterpated-ness that you experienced at the start has completely faded away.

What now?

Are diminished feelings reason enough to walk out the door? Is there a way to get them back or are you sentencing yourself to spending the remainder of your life as you currently are if you stay?

It may seem like you are faced with only a few choices here: Stay or leave? Revive the feelings or remain the same?

Let’s put those choices and those questions on the back-burner for now. I want to see if we can approach this situation from a different angle, perhaps bypassing these questions altogether.

I want you to recall the last time you were extremely happy. Did your favorite team win a tough game? Did your child do something totally awesome? Did you succeed at something you really struggled with?

Whatever it was, bring that moment to mind. Picture where you were.

See the scene.

Feel the emotion.

Remember what you were thinking.

Now, did the experience direct your emotion or did your emotion direct your experience? Let me ask it another way: which came first – the happiness-inducing moment or the happiness itself?

You were in one emotional state and then suddenly “it” happened. Your mind took in and processed the event as your senses perceived it.

You saw something, you smelled something, you heard something, you felt something, you tasted something… all that information got inputted into your brain and processed. What your brain spit out was a determination that this was a very good thing.

How did your brain decide it was a good thing?

It compared this event against some standard that you have adopted. It was compared to something that you believe deeply.  You believe it is good for your team to win or for your child to do what he or she did or for you to succeed.

This circumstance met the standard you hold in your mind.

And this made you feel very happy.

Now…

Why is it that someone else is happy when your team loses? Why is it that someone else is indifferent to your child’s achievement? Why is it that someone else is upset at your success? (Contrary to popular belief it probably isn’t just because they are an idiot. So keep reading.)

It is because they either perceived the situation differently or they hold a different belief than you.

If either your perception or your belief changes (not the circumstances), then you get a different experience. Your happy experience is someone else’s sad experience because you each took in the information and compared it to a different belief. Your brains determined the situation differently making you each feel differently.

Now go back to that lost lovin’ feeling.

Is it really gone… gone… gone, whoa-oh-whoa-oh-whoa?

Or has your perception changed? Or your belief changed?

Maybe you have developed different expectations for your spouse. He should be doing this. She should be doing that. He doesn’t act the way that I want him to. She doesn’t do the things that I like.

If either the perceptions or beliefs change, the experience is different. What used to make you happy or loving, now makes you upset or disappointed.

So, your perception or your belief needs to change again in order to bring back that lovin’ feeling.

The controls are in your hands, fly-boy. You may not be able to change the circumstances, but you can change how you see them, what you think about them, and ultimately how you feel about them.

You control these things.

If you want to get back that lovin’ feeling, it all starts with having some serious conversations with your brain.

Watching Top Gun once or twice won’t hurt either. I mean, come on, it is an awesome movie.

“What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”

My 4-year old son has recently taken to sneaking things so that he can enjoy whatever seems enjoyable of that particular item before getting caught and having it taken away.

It has become quite frustrating. My husband and I have tried explaining the wrongness of sneaking, hiding, and lying. We have told him many times that if something has to be hidden or performed in secret, then it most certainly is something that he should not be doing at all.

That fact has not yet sunk in for my son, which shouldn’t surprise me, because I think that fact eludes most adults as well. Except we shroud our actions in terms of privacy and personal space and individual rights. The truth, however, is that most of what we do in secret should not be done at all either.

But, the idea of confessing our wrong actions, of bringing into the light whatever we have been keeping in the dark, is quite scary.

For some things, we know exactly what is hidden, which is why we keep it hidden.

For other things, we imagine our secret to be worse than it really is because it has been secreted away for so long. If we were to open the door to that particular closet, we’d realize that what we believed to be a monster is really a mouse. Unfortunately, for most of us, our fear keeps us from ever investigating and we continue to live in fear of our secret monsters.

For all the rest, we stashed them away in the dark a long time ago, and we have allowed ourselves to forget about them. It is as if our mind has erected a barrier that keeps that part of ourselves locked away so we don’t have to deal with it. We look in that direction and all we see is darkness. We have no real idea what is there.

We hide things from others. We hide things from ourselves. We hide things from God. Or, at least, we think we do.

The Bible says of God, “He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him” (Daniel 2:22, ESV).

He reveals deep and hidden things. Things we have removed from sight, not to be searched out.

He knows what is in the darkness. An inherent knowledge, a revelatory knowledge of our darkest places.

The light dwells with him. Both an illumination and a wisdom that fellowships and abides in him.

A light and a wisdom that abides within every Christian through the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit.

That means that there is nothing truly hidden, no real secrets, and no impenetrable darkness in which we can keep our actions from being found out. Which is both a dreadful notion and a relief. We dread the judgment, reaction, and mistreatment that could accompany such revelations. Yet, there is also a relief in knowing that these hidden, secret things do not have the degree of power that we currently believe them to have.

Walking out of the oppression that is the darkness in which we hide and secret things away is a difficult process, at best. However, if we can take one thing at a time and first confess it to God, then to ourselves and finally to one other person, then we could truly be free.

If God already knows the worst of ourselves and loves us anyway, and if we can face the worst of ourselves and love ourselves anyway, then perhaps revealing it to someone who also loves us might not be so bad. Perhaps the price of this freedom is worth paying.

“Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16, KJV).

(Title quote by Andre Malraux.)