Live to Love, Love to Live

Oswald Chambers says in "My Utmost for His Highest", "Many of the cruel things in life spring from the fact that we suffer from illusions. We are not true to one another as facts; we are true only to our ideas of one another."

I have been thinking about this quote a lot lately. I was hanging out with some friends of mine and this quote came up and we talked for awhile about it. Think about it, we immediately place a stereotype on people based on news coverage or what we have heard. Centuries we have created pain in others lives through an illusion of who they are. Grant it sometimes it is good to have an illusion of who someone is and what they may do to protect ourselves in certain instances. But, we are so quick to criticize people without factual evidence of who that person is. It is something I have noticed I can do a pretty good amount. I am working on killing those illusions and despairing of no one.

I know this is something that I had to work on before I got married and now while I am married. We have this illusion of how our wife/husband will be and these expectations. These expectations will never be met. We humans have a higher standard for things that involve us than to place it on a mere human being. The divorce rate is higher and higher because we selfishly feel like we deserve a better spouse and this is not so. No spouse will ever meet our true expectations. No person will ever live up to the high standard we create. But, we continually try and find it in so many others and other things. The more we realize human beings screw up, we will always make mistakes, and we are not perfect the closer we are to making things right.

I look at Jesus' life and He trusted no man, yet he was never suspicious or bitter to anyone. His confidence in God's grace and what it could do for any man was so perfect that he despaired of no one. I am not trying to impose Jesus onto people's lives, but we constantly can see, factually, that we humans will not be quenched by a human being. The more we release this standard from everyone and especially our spouses and turn it towards God is when we are moving towards a true quenching of our heart's.

Oswald says lastly, "There is only one Being Who can satisfy the last aching abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ."