During my workout, I was listening to a song called "Stolen" by Brandon Heath, and as my mind tends to do, it wandered onto the deeper meaning of what the song means.
It's such a romantic term, to steal one's heart. To steal means to take that which is not yours, to have it in your possession, to take without permission. "How does one steal a heart?" I thought to myself. "Why don't we just say you became dedicated or decided to single out one person for your affections? No, we say stolen.
As I thought about it more, it started to become clear to me. When you fall in love with someone, it's not by any choice of yours. You don't line up a bunch of people and pick out the one that would be best suited to you. No, rather you get to know someone, their strengths and weaknesses, their flaws and their perfections, and then you begin to fall in love with them. Never has one picked out the perfect person based solely on rational thinking and consideration for what their present and future self requires. It's always a general acceptance of a completely random person. In other words, they steal your heart. They take that which is not theirs.
Then I began to think of this on a grander scale, that is, love between man and his Creator. God's heart wasn't "stolen" by us in the way I just described, but He still chose to love us despite how messed up we are. When you meet someone and fall in love with them, you might tell them about a lot of your flaws, and they might see some of them first hand. But God KNOWS every single screwed up thing about you, and He loves you anyways. That is the most amazing type of love I have ever heard of. Even when you've done something so horrible that you hate yourself, God still loves you. When you keep making the same mistake over and over, He still loves you. He doesn't love you because of what He might get out of you now or later.
Turn things the other way around, and things become a bit more complicated. The song's main focus was the love we as humans have for God. This is where the whole heart thief thing comes back, because falling in love with God can be the same process. God doesn't have any flaws we have to look past or learn to love over time, but being a Christian does come with a lifestyle, a label, a rejection from friends and family, and rejection from the things of this world. You can have peace, fulfillment real true love, but you'll have to deal with living in a world that hasn't experienced the love you have. You have to let God steal your heart, to have full possession of it no matter what sort of crap you'll have to deal with later. Fall irrationally in love with Him and give Him your whole heart.
I believe God made the human emotion/act of love so we can understand what it is He feels for us, and what we should feel for Him. When I love my boyfriend, my siblings, my parents...all these different kinds of love give me a glimpse into the love He has for me. It's truly amazing to think I have a God like Him.
