love dare
“I really owe Jack a thank you,” Josh is saying, talking love like he does more and more all the time, his hand gently patting Riley’s knee, his eyes alight with old, otherworldly affection. “Because had it not been for Jack, I might not have ever found you.”
Humans talk, our chins around the table bobbing, of love ebbing, like a tide, as if diminishing should be expected, tarnish, elemental. But I wonder if that only means we’ve confused the thing itself with the shine. We humans talk that way, meanwhile God describes love as life force that grows, rather more than over and above, building with recognition and discernment, like a spilling flood, like a river overflowing its banks. The way Josh looks at Riley these days, after so many years of deep friendship, of remaining, it’s like someone’s thrown open the dam.
“Okay, let’s go,” Kevin says, gathering up his wallet and keys, and we’re all out the hotel room, one by one by two, our feet shuffling over the carpet in the hall, the two of them still talking love on our way to the elevator.
Maybe if we told our own love stories more, rehearsed them as we go, like Riley and Josh do, it would be easier not to get stuck in the adolescence of our affections. Jesus-people call this preaching the gospel to ourselves, acknowledging that we need an active memory of His Love in order to keep realigning our own understanding of love with the prototype.
“And then I would not be here, with you,” Josh says, gesturing toward an enormous vase of waxy flowers that sits on the far wall, coming to a stop behind us as we wait, like we’re standing on the edge of the future, for the down arrow to ding and those big wide metallic doors to slide apart.
“Mmhmm, that’s true,” Riley murmurs agreeably, and as I glance back, she lifts their clasped hands to carefully inspect the one-to-one interweaving of their fingers, to make sure, I think, that her fingers fill all the valleys between his.
“I wouldn’t be doing stuff like this with you,” Josh continues. “I wouldn’t be a fiancée at all.”
If I thought about where I would be apart from Love, about who I wouldn’t be: I wouldn’t be free, an escapee of slavery to myself, to trauma, to the past, to broken ideas, to death. I wouldn’t be alive, at least not this way.
Meanwhile, Jack. I wonder how he factors into the Josh-Riley equation.
The elevator arrives at our floor and a silver couple emerges, she, pushing the peeling strap of her handbag back up on her shoulder, he, with a crumpled tissue peeking over the top of the front pocket of his button-down. He reaches for her arm, just naturally, like he does it all the time, hikes his right hip up about an inch just to get his leg moving. Maybe, the future has risen to meet us, instead. Happily, we wait, and the silver couple grins. Riley says, hi, her voice lilting, bright with welcome.
Josh shakes his head, obviously lost in his thoughts, looks down at his feet right next to Riley’s, at the way their bodies rise together side-by-side, reflected in the glossy gold hi-buff tile floor in front of the elevators.
He mumbles half to himself, swiping a hand down over his face and grinning wild, says, “All because of a dare.”
“A dare?” I finally interject, having not heard the story, as we shuffle into the now empty elevator car and the doors slide closed in front of us.
Riley reaches over to push the button for the lobby, and the elevator, after a calculated pause, slowly descends.
“See, Jack dared me to kiss Riley,” Josh says, his free arm flying out, palm open, expansive, his volume soaring with the excitement of sharing. “You remember Jack, right?” That last word builds slow over his tongue, like some kind of sweet richness rising.
I nod, remembering that when Riley and Josh first met, they’d had a friend named Jack with a round, ripe voice and a bold, blunt way of speaking. His personality had more than overwhelmed his stature, and so, it did not surprise me that the Jack I knew had issued a dare to kiss, just that Josh and Riley had, all the way back in those days, interpreted this not as some sort of silly example of male bravado, but instead as a dare to love.
“Oh, he did, did he?” I smile wide, caught up in their joy.
When it comes to love, most of us err by sliding the opposite way, treating what isn’t a dare at all but a command to love one another like a frozen flagpole challenge to offer up some simple affection to a difficult person or as an aspiration to show basic human kindness. I can’t help thinking about how upside-down that makes us.
Around that table of humans discussing love, someone says this command really means just not holding a grudge, just thinking nice thoughts.
“It’s not as if we have to have a relationship with someone to love them,” they say, and again, chins bob.
But I am letting it sink, that with Jack’s dare to kiss, a lifelong companionship started, and I am wondering what crazy thing might happen if we sat around our tables and dared one another to love as Jesus loved us. What would happen, say, if instead of watering things down to a more manageable level, we dared together to lie back in God’s flooding river and remember that our Christ repeated His new command, that we love one another, multiple times as part of His last spoken words to His disciples before He went to the cross? What if we retold the story of real Love out loud together, wide-eyed with wonder, on our way into the future, waiting on doors to open, as we go along, how His hands dripped with wash water as He held their dirty feet in tender palms and said, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another”?
“Well, see, one time, Jack dared me to kiss Riley,” Josh says, reiterating for me, “and so, I asked her if I could kiss her, and she said I could, so I did, and, well, one thing led to another, and we decided to be boyfriend and girlfriend, and now here we are.” Josh has been turning their clasped hands with every clause, flipping them without even thinking about it, but when he says this last—now here we are, he looks up at Riley’s face and smiles, joy breaking free, says with a laugh, “Jack really had no idea what he was starting, did he?”
“Mm, no he didn’t,” Riley says, nodding, her eyebrows sliding up.
“Well, thanks be to Jack,” I say, sharing the grin, thinking really, thanks be to God, for His indescribable gift. It’s like God to take a Jack dare and turn it into abiding, to turn a crazy risk to give yourself away into a love that stays, a unity that keeps.
So hey now, here we are waiting, and I turn to you and say, go ahead and love like Jesus. Go ahead and love someone–even an enemy–to death. I dare you.
