The Pure Love of Christ

We so often love imperfectly, incompletely, brokenly, because we have imperfect, incomplete and broken hearts. We may plead with our Heavenly Father with all of the energy of our souls to fill us up with the pure love of Christ; however, although it pours out from Him pure as the driven snow, we can only receive it with our impure and broken hearts. It will spill through the cracks. It will sour and turn rotten with our corrupt hearts. We never love as fully or completely as we could wish. We fall short of our imagination and our dreams and our hopes when we try to do something nice or special or decent or honest for those we love. We also never love as purely as we would wish. Too often our love gets mingled and twisted by jealousy, anger, fear, greed. As we let these impurities into our hearts, the pure love of Christ turns sour - we get jealous and overreact, or afraid and cling too hard, or self-centered and start to take the one we love for granted. But while God may pour His pure love into impure, broken vessels, this does not mean that our hearts cannot change. The more we earnestly and honestly and fearlessly seek for God to fill us up with His pure love, the more His love will mend and heal and purify our broken hearts. At first, maybe most of His love spills through the many holes in our hearts. But over time, His love will close up those holes. We have all been traumatized by life in some way or another, but the more of Christ’s pure love that pours into us, the more our hearts heal and we can love a little less brokenly and a little less impurely. Christ’s perfect love will begin to cast out fear and doubt and anger and jealousy and self-centeredness. We will grow in our capacity to love more fully and more completely and more perfectly. It is OK if at first it seems like God is pouring His love into a rusty colander, and the love we share is too little and too impure. We just have to keep coming back for more and more of Christ’s pure and purifying love to heal our hearts, so that our hearts may one day be pure and whole enough to hold His pure love perfectly.