This is a healing song

I've posted and deleted and reposted and marked as draft so many times on this blog.
I keep taking down the old stuff because I feel like every time I come back to my blog I want to take it a different direction.  How about I let it shift directions, however abruptly it may seem, and just keep plugging away at life?  I think that since life is messy and not always the same, it's ok if my writing goes different directions at different times.  I think I'm going to go back and repost some of the less angry stuff from this summer.  It's all part of my healing journey, after all.

So right now....
I'm at a place where I have learned to accept amazing grace that covers all of my past.  And present and future too, although should we go on sinning so that grace may abound? By no means!  So now that I've gotten somewhat of a handle on that healing and moving forward from the past, I'm digging and trying to find out what the remaining issues are.

Some time during the winter of probably 1996, I was sitting in a plastic chair at a hotel pool with my friend, debating love.  (We used to hang and chat, and in the winter in Michigan, what better place to hang?)  He had me reading about God's love, both on my own and with him.  He had me memorizing scriptures like Romans 8:38-39, ³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
It didn't make any sense to me.  I read it.  I memorized it.  I had no frame of reference.  It's like telling my 5 year old how much our house cost; he has no way to understand that amount of money.  I had no way to understand unconditional, undeserved love.  I argued that love didn't exist, that there was no such thing, and that I wasn't going to work to give or receive love because it had no bearing on my life.  Fast forward nearly 20 years.  This time we are in metal chairs at No Thai!, and I again have my arms crossed, again telling this same friend that this love crap doesn't make sense.  Oh, I had grown in my thinking, don't get me wrong.  But I still was quite broken in my thinking.  I had come to understand a misconstrued definition of love, one that involved one individual needing the other.  Again, he's telling me I'm wrong.  (And he's allowed to do that.)

So here's where I'm at right now:
My current personal definition of love is a spontaneous or manufactured relationship where at least one side has a measurable need for the other side, and has strong emotions around filling that need.  The need can be changed during the relationship, but it must stay present for the love to stay present.
I wish I could say that I hear the ridiculousness in that definition, but I honestly don't.  It is so deeply engrained in my mind and in my past that it is my reality.  I know, because I've been told by really smart people who always tell me the truth, that it's an incorrect definition.  But having the head knowledge is one thing, believing it and adjusting life accordingly is another thing entirely.  

So that's where I'm at.  I'm working on understanding what love is.  What it looks like, both the giving and receiving.  Not what it feels like, because my feelings are not reliable.  But I have people in my life that love.  Amazing people who love me so incredibly much, who continually invest in my life because they want to, not because they need anything from me.  I know that.  I've got to remove this wall that I have though, this wall that keeps me from understanding the awesomeness that I already have.  That I already give. This wall that says all this great stuff is irrelevant, doesn't mean anything. This wall that is an internal problem and cannot be fixed by anything external.  This wall that only I can take down.  

Lord help me.