I Still Love You

“What do I love when I love my God?”

 

This is a famous question asked in St. Augustine’s “Confessions” that many people through the centuries have pondered and wrestled with.  

 

I too have wrestled with that question. And I can tell you it wasn’t just a theoretical or casual philosophical conversation for me. For me, it felt like the slow breaking of a tree branch I was perched upon over a cliff.  It was terrifying and painful and often lonely.  But one thing that I think sometimes gets missed in conversations around “deconstruction” is that there is often a deep love that is underneath and even fueling the questioning. I didn’t question God because it was a cool or progressive thing to do… I didn’t question the Bible because I was trying to be relevant culturally. I questioned God BECAUSE I loved God. I questioned the Bible because it was so important to me.  

 

This tension between loving something and not being able to understand it has shown up not just in my spiritual journey, but my personal life as well. In the last several years, some of my most important relationships have either been lost or redefined in some very scary and painful ways. But honestly, I still have such deep love for every one of those people. So what do you do in those scenarios? What do you do when your structures/expectations/understanding of reality falls apart even while you still are in love? What do you do when you love God even if you don’t know how to believe in God? What do you do when you love someone but don’t know how to define your relationship or understand them? This new single, “I Still Love You” that dropped today is an exploration of that tension. Sometimes, you just gotta let things be what they are. And maybe that’s actually the heart of what true, unconditional love is.