We love him because he first loved us

I wonder how God felt when he said those words? As a child I always read those words as a fact. That is just how it is. But now that I am grown, I find that I have people who love me only because I loved them first ... and sometimes more ... and sometimes only love me still because I love them still. And for me, their love is bitter and sweet. It is sweet in the moments when I am being loved, and bitter when I remember why I am loved. I am loved because I first loved them. They are affectionate because I first showed affection. Does God look at us bitter sweetly? Does he enjoy those brief moments of love from us and then feel the pain when he remembers that we only love him because he first loved us?

It honestly bothers me that they love me because I first loved them. They ought to have loved me at the same instant. They should have loved me from the get-go and not have waited to see if I would provide them with the service of love. They should have seen me and loved me in the same instant and not have had to be wooed into it. I think that love is blind, because the brief beginning moments of the heart, that translate into years of proper time, when I was loving them all along ... and only now realize that the love, though it is there now, was not there all that time when I thought that it was ... hurts. And if we love God because he first loved us, would we stop loving God if he stopped loving us? Is that part of what pain plays in our lives? I mean, besides forming our character and making us better people?

Take Job, thinking that God did not love him ... did he stop loving God? And how much did God hurt because of it?

If God chooses to let me be cursed with acne for the rest of my life, and have pains from my marriage, and be cursed by the world just to see that my love won't stop just because his love is not physically evident for a mere few earthly years ... I can't blame him for that. I want to know the same thing in my relationships. But then God doesn't test us. He just allows us to be tested. Why would he test us? He already knows all the answers.

But human nature, my heart, wants to test. The only problem is, though, that if I tested, if I stopped loving, just to see if that would stop them from loving me ... and they kept loving me ... then I would feel ashamed for doubting their love. That's the other thing about human nature, just because it seems a certain way does not necessarily make it so.

And so we love him because he first loved us, and maybe, hopefully, that doesn't bother him the way that it bothers me. He is, after all, the bigger man.