2015 was the fifth year of my seven-year journey back home to the Garden. As I began writing down my experiences that year my heart urged me to entitle my work, the ‘Quest for Love’. So, I immediately began documenting my quest for love by asking the question; what is love? I knew the answer as soon as I asked the question; God is love! But what exactly does that mean? What does that look like in my life? How do I come to believe that it is true? How do I experience it on a moment-by-moment basis? Those were the questions ruminating in my mind at the time, but it wasn’t long before the Lord stepped in and called a time out.
“You’re going about this all wrong. He said! Why don’t you try changing the title to ‘Quest to Love’? At first, I was thinking, “that’s just quibbling over semantics!” Then suddenly it hit me, ‘BOOM’, I fell right to my knees. This is not just exchanging two words; it changes the entire course of this year’s journey. So, I then asked myself the question, ‘what if I did exchange the word ‘for’ with the word ‘to’? I began to see with much clarity the difference between the two words and it made me realize that there in lies the problem. I, along with probably most people in the world are on a quest for love (seeking self-validation through the affection of others) instead of a quest to love (recognizing that we are already loved and thereby able to make the conscious choice to love others whether they love us back or not).! You see, because God loved us first, we are already loved to the core and fully validated as worthy and precious in His sight. Having received and embraced this love we are then able to share and express it to others, no questions asked. The ‘Quest for Love’ has been flipped on its head. Our new quest is ‘To Love’ others in the same way God loved us.
Wow! The simple exchange of two words would dramatically change the course of my year’s journey as well as forever change the course of my life. I must admit I have tried everything under the sun to experience God’s love. I have performed to earn it, abstained to feel it, and sacrificed to justify it. And yet it was there the whole time, and it came in the form of His son Jesus. God loved us so much that He gave His only begotten son so that we may have His love for eternity. “Greater love has no one than this; to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” God is love and He gave it to us freely in His son. All we must do now is receive it and in gratitude share it with others!
Therefore, there is no longer a need to ‘quest FOR love.’ We already have that in Jesus. We should all be on a ‘quest TO love’ just as we are loved by God. Realizing this has changed every single one of my relationships in life. Realizing just how much God genuinely loves me has allowed me to pursue loving others as my cup runneth over. Stop and honestly think about that for a moment. What if the entire population of this earth was on a ‘Quest to Love’? Where everyone was already experiencing the Love of God and sharing it with others. It would be one giant lovefest. It would be paradise, a garden paradise like the one Adam and Eve inhabited before their disobedience. Yes, we would be living in our original paradise abode, the Garden! That is where we are headed folks, back home to the Garden! Keep walking and let us quest to love one another along the way!
Dario L. Perla