What Pinky and the Brain Can Teach Us About Love
In the 90's there was a little cartoon show called "Pinky and the Brain". This Steven Spielberg Produced show featured a tiny lab mouse genetically altered to be super-intelligent. If you want to know more check out this wikipedia article that treats the show with an amazing amount of gravitas. Each episode features Brain and his insanely wacky sidekick "Pinky" hatching some scheme to try to take over the world. Of course they are really powerless, insignificant mice - so each plan is doomed to failure. Part of what makes the show humorous is the premise of small fragile mice bent on world domination. Each show ends up with Pinky asking Brain the same question, "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?" To which Brain always answers in his best Orson Welles intonation, "The same thing we do every night Pinky. Try to take over the World!" [listen here]
Of course Brain has the best of intentions. He believes that he's best suited to run the world (being super intelligent and all). He's not trying to hurt anyone. He just feels that he needs to be in control, for everyone's sake. When he's pushed, however, he acknowledges a more selfish reason. It's "something he wants to do". Brain is continually frustrated because he cannot control things that are laughably so far beyond his stature. Do you think that God sometimes sees us in that fashion? I don't mean he looks at us as if we are lab rats. I mean that perhaps he sees us as loveable little megalomaniacs, striving to take over and control things that are exponentially beyond us? The truth is that we can pay a terrible personal price for gloaming onto power and control.
To Be Loved
"Controlling" usually runs afoul of our capacity to allow ourselves to be loved. Notice, I said "to be loved". In my own experience my biggest hurdle has not been loving others, but learning to accept love from others. Once you make up your mind to love it can turn into a self-sacrificing and noble action you feel good about. It assuages your guilt and medicates your pain when you choose to love others. But to allow yourself to receive love - now that's another matter. There is something scary about being "the beloved" of someone else.
Perhaps you've never thought of it that way. Opening yourself up to love is not a "no-brainer". If you are a guy you probably get what I'm saying right away. It's a cliché that men are "afraid of commitment" - afraid to take a relationship to the level where intimacy requires trust and investment. In fact there is a tension in us men between "control" and "letting go". Society reinforces the idea that a man should be "in control". Men often seek to dominate their own "personal world". A man obsessed with control will even shrink his world down to only those things that he feels he can control. Such men often live lonely, isolated lives where they fail to connect with anyone. They have chosen status over community - power over love. Still, everyone has a few issues with control. We all have a thirst for control that battles with our yearning to be loved. Accepting the love of someone else is scary. It makes us feel shaky and vulnerable. We are much more comfortable "trying to take over the world". What makes accepting love, especially God's love, so difficult?
Scorekeeping
Many things might stand in the way of accepting God's love. Fear of rejection, fear of betrayal and false humility (pride veiled in woe-is-meism) all come to mind. I'd like to focus on one obstacle that has been working in me from time to time. One thing in my life that has stood in the way of accepting love (from God or from others) is a sort of competitive one-upmanship that keeps me evaluating my status. If you have kids this is a behavior with which you are intimately familiar. A few years ago my youngest son, Matthew, developed a bad habit when dealing with his older brother. He would antagonize his brother to the breaking point, and sometimes his brother would shove him or smack him or otherwise invade his personal space. Matthew would immediately break into the saddest most heart wrenching cries you've ever heard. His piteous cries were so convincing I thought a Laplander was chewing off his leg. He was trying to draw the attention of a parent. His goal was to garner sympathy and to be able to tell his side of the story first. He knew that if he could be reasonably believable he would "come out on top". Sometimes this actually worked and Ann or I would sympathize with him and discipline his brother - usually because his brother failed to take responsibility for his part in the ruckus.
I like to call this attitude "scorekeeping". Scorekeeping is the process of damaging or discounting a relationship for the sake of staying "one up". Matthew was willing to throw his brother under the bus in order to score points with Mom and Dad. What Matthew failed to recognize is that the score he was keeping only mattered to him. We parents usually manage to treat our children as they are without regard to the score. We parents are analysts, not handicappers. But in the world of sibling rivalry children are all grasping little mice bent on domination. Unfortunately this behavior is not unique to children. Scorekeeping crops up at work, in marriage and even (gasp) in the church. It seems like we spend a great deal of time and effort trying to figure out who is ahead.
Scorekeeping stifles our ability to accept love. If we allow ourselves to "let go" and become vulnerable then we lose the upper hand. We lose control of the situation. Instead of being "owed" we now "owe". That's what happens when we accept the love of someone else - it becomes an obligation. It's requires a response. That's the contract of the beloved. To be beloved by God obligates you to return his love. That is its drawing power. The capstone of that love is Jesus' sacrifice on the Cross. Paul put it this way in Romans 5:
God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still his enemies.
Jesus' sacrifice has this great drawing power because it is rooted in love. It wasn't a mere transaction to pay the penalty for our sin. It was a personal sacrifice freely given. It compels us... it draws us to him. God didn't treat the human race like seabirds in an oil spill. He didn't just muster the troops to go "clean us up". He became one of us, lived with us, and died for us. When we recognize the true magnitude of his sacrifice we cannot ignore it. Jesus said of his sacrifice in John 12:
32 But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." 33 He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.
Jesus tells us in this prophetic word that his sacrificial act of love compels us to be drawn to him. This call - to accept his love - must be answered, and it cannot be ignored.
But accepting his love means you are no longer in control. It means you can't "win". There's no scoreboard - no tally of merits and demerits. Instead, accepting his love means that you are willing to allow yourself to decrease and Him to increase. On the other hand, resisting his love means maintaining control and "winning". Is that what you were created for? To stand alone on the top of the heap? The mouse-sized ruler of a kingdom of one? No indeed. You were created to love and to be loved.
His standard of measurement is quite different from ours. His desire is to know you and to be known by you. He's not keeping score any more than I was with my sons. Instead, he thinks of you as you are and as you can be through him. To accept his love means giving up on the dream of world domination - but only the domination of your own small world. In the words of that famous song that makes me want to hit myself repeatedly with a stick "it's a small world ... after all".
So give in to love - all the way. Abandon yourself to Him. Jesus Loves you. It's true. I'm overwhelmed by the fact that when he looks at me he experiences what I experience when I look at my own children, except infinitely deeper. His thoughts about us are vividly personal. That single truth, that Jesus loves me, is simple enough to be understood by a child of three yet so complex I unpack new layers every day. Unlike so many things that fall short of expectations, the love of God actually is a panacea.
Choir Director, singer, piano player, technologist and erstwhile blogger.