Looking For Love in all the Wrong Places

I thought of a new shirt idea…on the front it advertises the reality of our heart, saying “In Need of Love”, and on the back coins the words “Unaware I Already Have It”.

I’m not sure who would be bold enough to wear it, but I can tell you that we are all already wearing that shirt on the insides of our soul. We tend to go through our lives with the empty longings in search of love. We seek validation and affirmation in some of the right but mostly all of the wrong places. We have days that feel desperate that we cling to even the false premise and temporary relief of love.

It is those moments, and those times of isolation that we turn to the world to find the answer to the inner voids in our lives. Those moments that we lose sight of the eternal and can only grasp the visible, and the touchable representations of love we can find. We all do this. Look for it in the wrong place while overlooking that we had the lasting love we had been searching for all along.

Like the pencil you can’t seem to find under that stack of papers because you’ve forgotten you tucked it behind your ear.

Love is right there in front of us, with its arms stretched out wide and we look right through it. Gaze in the distance as if it is so real we don’t even recognize it in front of our noses.

We run the race of life looking for love, in search of it. Gaining it in an overly affirming friend, or the social media post that grants us the recognition we are seeking, or that taste of chocolate or alcohol that gives us a shift in our mood into a soothing of the soul.

All the wrong places. Because all we see is what everyone else does, just the front of the shirt, that we are “In Need of Love”.

One day we’ll turn it around. I can only hope to read the back before I put that shirt on in the morning. That I can know that I am walking around in search of something I already have.

That I have a God that pursues me, a love that entangles me, and the gift of grace that won’t let go of my grasp no matter how far away I try to out run it.

I am reading the back. It looks like it’s written in a foreign language so I am trying to understand it. But I am reading it and trying to learn what it means. And even bigger, trying to know how it feels to really believe it.  To know that I was completely unaware that I already had it.

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