Better than you think

I had dinner at Chris and Lorna’s again. Something like this was bound to come up. We were chewing the fat, when suddenly Lorna starts singing this:

Love is like a magic penny
Hold it tight and you won’t have any
If you share it then you’ll have so many
They’ll roll all over the floor!

Love is something if you give it away
Give it away
Give it away
Love is something if you give it away
You’ll end up having more...

It’s an old kid’s song from school assemblies. That sort of thing doesn’t get blogged very often, which is enough reason alone to mention here. But here’s how I’m seeing it in my life – I’m going out with Emma.

Until now, I’ve never experienced romance as a positive thing. It’s always been a bottomless well to pour my energies in with no return. I got turned down last year by someone else, went away and spent 2 months trying to become superman so she’d change her mind. I took up jogging, and shouting ‘come on’ to people’s prayers. Thank God, these highly impressive achievements made no impact. But it’s a pretty classic example of my experience: love means working hard and getting nothing back.

I think I also projected this idea onto my relationship with God. Jesus said the most important thing in life is to ‘love God with all you heart, mind, soul and strength.’ Though I wouldn’t have said it, my expectation was that this would look like me working hard at being a good person, being good to others; and getting nothing back.

Now I could have told you then that that’s a load of misery-inducing nonsense, but that did not change the way I felt. Funnily enough, experience and expectation are closely linked – we tend to expect things will turn out the way they have before. So I’m hoping this upswing in my experience will encourage one in your expectation. Because my new experience is changing mine.

Instead of me working hard for Emma and getting nothing back, she not only way out-does me in acts of love, but I get as much joy out of doing things for her. I’m asking the universe, ‘how can this be allowed? Shouldn’t a certain amount of happiness cost an equivalent amount of pain? Isn’t the law of nature that energy only transfers from one state to another, but can never be created? Have I slipped through some kind of cosmic loophole which will be closed as soon as someone finds out?’

Which brings us back to the song. The magic of love is that it multiplies. It waves two fingers at ‘the laws of the universe’ (at least, to the wrong ideas I’ve got playing dictator to my head). This is what loving God is really like. It’s getting, getting, getting, far more and more quickly than I can ever give back.

I recently gave what I thought was a large amount of money to an international life-saving/community enrichment programme (which I saw as giving it to God). This weekend, two different groups of people offered to pay for me to go to two conferences- which together is worth at least £50 more than what I gave away! My generosity has already been outdone.

I could choose to believe my doubts – nothing is provable beyond the shading of a doubt – that all this is coincidence, and God either isn’t there or doesn’t care. It’s very easy to do, seeing as my experience of his love is so bound up with a picture of him I’ve built up through indirect means, like the story above and the stories in the Bible. I know lots of people who seem to experience his love more directly, through their feelings. Emotional literacy has never been my strong point. I could believe my doubts about God, like I could believe that Emma doesn’t really like me, she’s just being nice because she’s a nice person... but doesn’t that seem a bit crazy?

I do this with a lot of things in life. I put so much more energy into doubting good things are true/will come true, than doubting bad things, or into believing good things. It’s almost as if I didn’t want good things to be possible.

Take the issue of partnering with Jesus to heal sick people – all my thinking goes to why it probably won’t happen. I feel reluctant to even talk about it, let alone do it. But I love hearing stories of Jesus healing people, in the Bible and now, with people I know. So why am I so keen so expect so little? Isn’t the saddest cliché in the world, ‘it’s too good to be true?’

A recent psychological survey found that people in Denmark are the happiest in the world; where happiness was measured by satisfaction with one’s life... but this was because they had such low expectations, and were therefore never disappointed!

I don’t want to be a Dane anymore. I want to take the risk of believing too much, not too little. I’m sure I’m going to be disappointed at times, and that might statistically make me less happy; but I’m much more afraid of coming to the end of my mortal life and realising, ‘reality was so much better than I thought it was. And I missed it.’