There is a quiet question that sits beneath many of our relationships, though we rarely ask it out loud.
It hides behind wisdom, standards, and common sense. It dresses itself in respectable language so that nobody notices what it really is. Sometimes it calls itself discernment.
Sometimes, it calls itself self-respect. More recently, it has taken refuge in a phrase that appears everywhere, spoken with the certainty of a commandment:
“Know your worth.”
And so you know your worth. You know the kind of person you deserve. You know what you bring to the table and what you will no longer tolerate. You know your standards. Your non-negotiables. Your expectations.
You know exactly what you are looking for. A good example is shopping.
You walk into a store looking for a pair of shoes. You find one, inspect the leather, check the stitching, and compare the price with the others that tickle your fancy.
You are barely interested in the shoe’s story or its unrealized potential. You’re there to see if the shoe matches what you want, and if it deserves a place in your life.
Nobody finds this strange. In fact, this is exactly how people shop. The strange thing is that somewhere along the way, many of us began doing the same thing with human beings.
Perhaps it sounds like one of those things old people say when they want to criticize young people for adapting to the world they inherited. But stay with me for a moment.
It is possible to have standards and still know how to love. Honestly, wisdom demands standards. The problem begins when standards quietly evolve into specifications and specifications slowly transform human beings into products.
You can always tell when this has happened because people stop talking about one another as though they are souls and begin talking about one another as though they are investments.
The Dating Pool Is Basically a Procurement Department
Listen carefully to conversations about love today. The language is revealing.
People discuss emotional intelligence, earning capacity, ambition, attractiveness, compatibility, self-awareness, communication skills, social status, family background, discipline, stability, and vision.
They weigh strengths and weaknesses as though conducting due diligence before acquiring a company.
Every requirement appears reasonable in isolation; that is precisely what makes the transformation so difficult to notice.
A man says he wants a godly woman.
A woman says she wants a responsible man.
By themselves, these desires are not wrong. Yet after enough conversations, something begins to emerge. You realize that almost everybody is asking the same question from different angles.
“How will this person benefit me?”
Not, “Who are you?”
Not even, “What kind of life can we build together?”
The tragedy is not that people ask the question. The tragedy is that many no longer realize they are asking it. Because if enough years pass, selfishness becomes difficult to recognize, and selfishness is often at its most persuasive when it sounds reasonable.
The truth is that most people do not want unconditional love.
What they want is favorable conditions.
They call this unconditional love because the alternative sounds cruel, but unconditional love, if it exists at all, is something far more unsettling. It demands that you confront the possibility that another person possesses value before they become useful.
God Would Be Terrible at Modern Dating
Most modern heartbreak, it seems, is not caused by the absence of love.
It is caused by the fear of risk. We are terrified of wasting our affection on the wrong person.
Terrified of being disappointed. Terrified of looking foolish. Terrified of giving more than we receive. So we construct increasingly sophisticated methods of screening people before they get close enough to hurt us.
The trouble with this strategy is that it eventually screens out the very thing love requires: grace.
For grace cannot survive in a room where everybody is being assessed. Grace only appears when someone is willing to see a person as more than the sum of their flaws.
Which brings us, quite unexpectedly, to God.
One of the most remarkable things about Scripture is God’s apparent disregard for the criteria that human beings find compelling. If God behaved like many of us, the Bible would be a very short book.
God has a relationship history that is summed up almost entirely by people who would fail modern screening processes.
Yet God keeps choosing them. Again and again.
Not reluctantly, not accidentally, but deliberately.
The longer you sit with that observation, the stranger it becomes.
For God never appears to ask the questions that fascinate us. He is curiously uninterested in the things people use to measure one another. Instead, He keeps focusing on possibility.
God is a builder. With Him, you don’t have to come complete. However, you, His image and likeness, prefer complete versions of people because unconditional love is better enjoyed than served, right?
Perhaps that is why grace feels so foreign to us.
Grace insists on seeing what does not yet exist, and that is difficult because flaws are always easier to see than possibilities.
Anybody can identify brokenness.
It takes vision to identify potential, and even greater courage to invest in it.
The story of the lost sheep illustrates this beautifully. For years, many people have read that parable without noticing how absurd it actually is.
A shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep in search of one. The mathematics of the story are terrible.
Isn’t that the song you sing every Sunday? The worst part is that you never see yourself as part of the 99. Bloody sinner!
Every sensible argument suggests that the shepherd should remain where the majority are safe and accept the loss of a single wandering sheep.
Yet Jesus tells the story as though the shepherd’s decision requires no explanation. The sheep is pursued because it is loved.
In a world obsessed with earning, that idea feels almost offensive. And if that is true, then many of our ideas about love require reexamination.
For what does it mean that you worship a God who loves people before they become lovable, yet spend so much of your life demanding that people become lovable before you love them?
What does it mean that you celebrate grace every Sunday yet struggle to offer second chances by Tuesday?
What does it mean that you spend your prayers asking God to understand your imperfections while spending your conversations disqualifying others because of theirs?
These are uncomfortable questions.
They should be. The most important truths usually are.
For perhaps the greatest irony of life is that people whose existence depends entirely upon grace can become remarkably reluctant to distribute it.
And perhaps that is why this thought keeps returning to me.
What if God had a spec? Dem go choose you?
In an age where almost every form of love asks first, “What is in this for me?”, the most radical thing a person can do is learn to ask a different question:
“Who can this person become?”
Because that is the question God asked when He looked at you.
