First Love

"But I have this [one charge to make] against you: that you have left (abandoned) the love that you had at first [you have deserted Me, your first love]."  Revelation 2:4

I love it when I'm sitting in church, listening to a message, and a verse and an idea come up that I've been thinking about for some time. It always confirms for me that my thoughts have been in the right direction, and it also always brings me to a little more understanding about the verse that I've been thinking on.

I've had several dreams over the past few months about first love, about the idea of first love.  At this stage in my life I found each and every one of them odd and strange.  As a more-than-happily-married person, it's been some time since I experienced the actual process of first love.  But I think that was the point, and I don't think, (now that I think on it some time later) that the dreams were anything about love between two people.  It was love between myself and God.  First love that maybe has lost it's luster.

So what is first love?  It's an excitement, an expectancy, a shyness.  It's discovering a person for the first time, getting to know their likes and dislikes.  It's thinking on that person all the time- it's waiting by the phone impatiently, waiting hours for them to call, and then squealing in delight when they finally do.  It's spending an entire day thinking about the person you'll be going on a date with later, and then after the date, you can't stop thinking about them then either.  It's being completely consumed by someone else.  It's going about your day, doing your work or your tasks, and then pausing to reflect on something the other person said that made you smile.  It's saving a small note that they wrote you and reading it a thousand times over, even though you have every word memorized. 

Gosh, the more I think on this idea of first love, and think about what it actually is, the more I very clearly see a relationship with God.   Andy and I have been together for... just over thirteen years... and the love we share has matured greatly, it's different, but the same in many regards.  And I think that's what God is after with us.  So many Christians get saved, they meet Jesus and experience God's love, and get all excited in the newness of the relationship for a time, but then the excitement fades, and God just becomes another aspect of that persons life, instead of the consuming focus He should be.  With God, He wants us to experience that first love each and every day with Him.  Every time we open up our Bibles to see what He's written, we should be squirming in excitement and anticipation, to see what He has to say to us today.  Instead, so many of us have relegated Bible reading to a chore, something that has to be done for a set time every single day. 

God wants us to experience First Love with Him each and every day.  Think about that- the excitement and the joy and the happiness that comes with a new relationship.  How could we not want that every single day? God wants that for us, and He wants it with us.