Embracing A Love That Liberates

Day 1 of 6: Introduction

If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

-John 14:15 (NRSV)

As a child, my understanding of love was very limited. In fact, love was scary, dangerous, and totalitarian. I was taught, through both my mother and the Pentecostal church I attended, that love was based on strict obedience. Both my mother’s love and God’s love for me were based on how well I could follow an impossible set of standards. For my mother I was expected to be quiet and obedient and make her look like the world’s greatest parent.

The expectations from God, at least as I was taught, were similar: I was to be quiet and obedient to God (ie the church I attended). Moreover, I was repeatedly told that even though I was a sinful, imperfect human being, I still needed to try and be as perfect as possible, so that others would see Christ in me and decide to follow Christ and avoid an eternity in hell. Verses such as John 14:15 were ripped from their literary and historical context, and wielded like a weapon to force compliance.

This narrow understanding of love often left me feeling ashamed, broken, and abandoned. After all, if I couldn’t perfectly follow my mother’s or God’s commandments, then I was undeserving of love. Moreover, if I were imperfect, then others would turn away from God and possibly go to hell when they died. And their eternal damnation would partially be my fault.

Yet because I am a type A personality that desires structure and rules, I tried repeatedly to be as close to perfect as possible. I craved to show both my mother and God that I was deserving of love. But every time I fell short, which was all the time, since I was a human being and only a teenager, the cycle of self-disgust and shame would rear its ugly head.

It wasn’t until I was older that I began to realize that the understanding of love that I was exposed to as a child was warped and served to justify neglect and abuse. It is dangerous to tie love to obedience, particularly if obedience is understood in terms of uncritically following a list of arbitrary rules. It was only as I began to accept the truth that God’s love is much more expansive than I could ever imagine that I learned that love is supposed to be liberating, free of manipulation and coercion.

What images of love were you exposed to as a child? How have they influenced your understanding of love today?

Naiomi Gonzalez

Day 1 of 6: Introduction

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