First Love

I had the sudden urge to look for my DC Talk CDs.  Their songs are cheesy, yes, but Jesus Freak and Free at Last were my first Christian CDs.  I would argue these are the quintessential albums for young Christians of my generation.  People may sell these short, thinking DC Talk was only about the title cut, but there are so many amazing songs on these albums.

Imagine my elation after saving up for weeks to finally be able to walk into Borders and check out at the register with my own saved up allowance.  And then to hurry home and listen to the CDs on repeat through the night.  I still have the lyrics of "In the Light" ingrained in my head after all these years.

"What's going on inside of me? I despise my own behavior
This only serves to confirm my suspicions
That I am a man in need of a Savior
I wanna be in the Light, as You are in the Light
I wanna shine like the stars in the heavens
Oh Lord, be my Light and be my salvation
'Cause all I want to be is in the Light"

Being an awkward adolescent that had no idea how to express himself, discovering these song lyrics was like striking gold.  I was hooked and in love.

There's nothing in the world that captures your heart like that feeling of your first love.  Whether it is with a significant other, or a hobby or your profession, your first love has an immense stronghold in who a person is.  It drives how a person acts, how a person thinks, the decisions they make in life.  Mozart understood this fully, saying this:

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius.  Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Too often do we forget that first love we felt in Christ.  It's amazing how subtly the world distracts us from this fact, isn't it?  As we age, we only get busier and busier with our lives.  From school, we get a job.  Most of us will get married.  We might have children.  Bills pile up.  Older loved ones pass away.  Circumstances arise in life that need our attention.  It becomes too easy to cope with the ever-piling load of responsibility by going through the daily motions.  This becomes a slippery slope towards a path of works-righteousness; that we ultimately have this need to perform in our lives to gain favor in the eyes of our loved ones, even God.

I want to remind myself and everyone that it is not our performance that He desires.  He just desires our heart.  Once we find ourselves in that place of rediscovering that first love we felt in Him, everything else will fall into place.