HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN LOVE?

Do you remember that guy or girl you fell in love with as a teenager? Maybe he/she was your bff’s sibling or just some random PYT (pretty young thing) or TDH (tall, dark and handsome) stranger that always swaggered or swung past your house. For some reason your attention was captured and that triggered off the hormones responsible for silly day dreams and heart tremors. Yes! That one you always did “notice me or I die” for.

Luckily for some of us, as teens that imagination never had the chance to blossom or grow into anything or grow anywhere outside our heads because we either had extremely nosy siblings or parents who would literally knock your daylights out if they even suspected. Bottom line there was always someone around to pour sand into your emotional garri or knock you back into the straight and narrow path.

Very few feelings can equal the ‘falling in love’ feeling. I tell you very few things can. That feeling eh! I know there is always a reason for whatever God designs but this one amazes me at its pure randomness. You will just be minding your own business trying to organise your life and then this person enters and boom! It’s all over. Your brain is temporarily scrambled, your once serious and determined demeanour slowly changes to that dopey look of someone whose mind has drifted to the Neverland of fairies, pixie dust and levitating castles. Then there is always this pesky feeling of some large winged insect fluttering round your tummy whenever the person strolls by.

It happens or has happened to most of us often at the most improbable and inconvenient times. It makes us feel like nothing else matters. It has absolutely no respect for our status or spirituality. It’s like hard drug. If not how else do you explain all the sappy love songs you hear on the radio? ,
’Even if the world crumbles, or the moon falls to the earth, even if the sun don’t shine, my love for you will remain’. Musicians for centuries have cashed in on it to make them rich and famous. A lady said to me “ ma from the day I met that guy, my bible started looking like text book, I remembered everything pastor said and  I believed it with all my heart, but I also knew I wasn’t going to do any of it’. 

Please don’t get me wrong, falling in love is not at all bad. It’s just that like almost every other thing good… we tend to abuse it. Living in a hyper sexualised world has made it almost impossible to preserve the beauty and innocence in anything. I believe there are so many ways to express and preserve love other than the heavy breathing, passionate ripping and tearing of clothes and the wild copulation that Hollywood has sold to us. If the feeling is kept on the right course, it is extremely powerful. But truth is, just like every drug…it eventually wears out. That means if all a relationship can boast of is a feeling so transient, then that relationship is inevitably doomed to end with an embarrassing crash. No matter how intoxicating the feeling is, it remains the spice and not the main dish in the savoury meal of true love. The things that really count are loyalty, trust, friendship, faithfulness, etc.

The worst yet is that we have an enemy who recognises its potency and is more than willing to use it against us. Yes! The devil has no qualms with using the person or situation we are most vulnerable to to score points. Combined with our fallen nature it becomes a potential explosive device. I know of so many men and women who have sold themselves short in life just for thrill of acting out that in love feeling. Co-dependency, crimes of passion, addiction, multiple abortions, violence - people will do the unfathomable for people they believe they are in love with. Visions lost, purposes aborted, great destinies destroyed, ministries shipwrecked just by giving in to our emotions when we could have extinguished the fire raging within our hearts, closed our minds to the crazy whisperings and walked on by.

It’s ok to be in love as long as the object of your affection does not begin to morph into an idol of the heart. This is where it becomes really tricky. No matter what, our feelings should never overshadow our reasoning or speak so loudly that the still small voice can no longer be heard. Sadly, like an Igbo adage states, it’s almost as difficult as trying to tether an extremely stubborn he goat that is bent on escaping.

Giving in to the in love feeling with the wrong person or at the wrong time is like handing to the devil the IED that will destroy our lives and cause pain to people who truly care for us. King Solomon said ‘…do not awaken or arouse love before its proper time’ SOS 2:7
It’s difficult but not impossible. There is time and a season for love and when it comes it is a wonderful gift that adds no sorrow.