Listening to Love

I am in the middle of another great book. In the first chapter, Jan Meyers says, "Love has a way of getting our attention. Actually, Love has a way of messing up our lives. We all know it to be true. If we desire a carefully ordered life, tranquil and serene, then when the Voice of Love calls, we had better run inside and bolt the door. Tight. We can never prepare for this most honored of all guests, who quietly enters and then asks us to follow. We wonder whether we know the Voice of Love, so we strain to discern it amid the cacophony around and in us. Then we begin to recognize it, and we're not sure we welcome it. It doesn't take us long to remember tender times we labored to hear God and followed as best we could, only to end up befuddled and confused for a while. Maybe this still, small, disruptive guest is after something more than making the path clear to us."

Throughout the book, she explores what she calls the three postures of the heart, the movements the heart goes through to follow the Voice of Love with confident expectation. The first posture of the heart is the invitation to respond and asks the question, "Is it really you, Jesus?" The second posture of the heart is facing what we fear, and we often respond with, "Oh no, it really is you, Jesus." The third posture of the heart is where we learn to admit what we really want and we respond with, "Oh good, it is you, Jesus." Using examples from her own life (losing her good friend and colleague, Brent Curtis, unmet expectations of marriage and her brother's battle with cancer) and stories of others' struggles as well, she talks about relinquishing our "control," our pride, our autonomy, our religion, and listening to sorrow, our need, each other, reality and our exhaustion as we strive to hear the Voice of Love.

She challenges us to "embrace a love that's worth the risk. While God does ask everything of us, he actually wants everything for us. He doesn't want blind loyalty or bored religious compliance; he longs for nothing less than our entire passionate selves--something most of us have yet to glimpse. God's desire is that we lean in, listen, and wrestle with him so that we can respond to him without fear. Can this God be trusted? Absolutely. Will the journey be easy? Not a chance. But once you learn to listen to love, you'll find that there's only one way you can adore this unmanageable, unpredicatable, wild, and unruly God: with your whole heart."