Rev. Steve Foss, First Baptist Church Sun Lakes
Often, our earliest memories of expressed love become the very fiber of life—the thread from which life’s memories are sewn. As a child, one’s life perception is egocentric: Everyone exists to meet “my” needs: protection, hunger, assurance, hygiene, and learning. Perhaps that’s where understanding love originates. If one’s most basic needs of life are not met, then one’s perspective is jaded from the beginning.
If you grew up in a home that clearly defined right and wrong, a home where parents sacrificed for their families, a home where love was both seen and deeply felt, a home where one was scolded for acting out and punished for willful defiance, a home where one was rewarded for excellence and celebrated for achievement, you grew up in a healthy home environment. Indeed, a healthy home is where love confronts lies with truth, gives up personal comforts to provide for those under one’s care, and where love is expressed often, opposing selfishness and self-centeredness.
Through life’s journey, one learns life patterns: To know respect, we must give respect; to experience success, we must help others succeed; to know love, we must dare to love. Then there is the head-on collision of preschool where we find that some do not know how to share. We enter elementary school and discover that love is not reciprocated. We learn to hold back, to hide our true feelings, to look strong. Freud called them ego defense mechanisms: emotional tools learned at an early age which act to protect the ego—the real identity of self, tied to self-love.
We advance to middle school where we develop more sophisticated forms of the defense mechanisms—all to protect the purest treasure from childhood, the love we knew as a child. As one navigates through high school and beyond, there may be the temptation to elevate the playing field of emotional experience, carelessly giving away the heart before being mature enough to understand the dangers of awakening love before its time.
Both males and females display efforts to make sense of life, as well as to bring significance to life through one’s quest to love and be loved. Yes, it hearkens back to the love given to us at birth. God offers us a higher love, and it leads to a rebirth. Jesus described it this way: “What’s born of the flesh is flesh; what’s born of the Spirit is spirit.” He even declared that one is unable to live eternally unless one is born again.
From the moment we were born, we were destined to die. Jesus died and rose again to give us eternal life, as well as abundant life and eternal love. Do you dare to ever love again? Experience the truest love you’ll ever know—in this life, or the next. Read John 3:16-17. If you do not have a Bible, meet me at First Baptist Church.