However if the person you marry becomes your ultimate focus in life, your struggle has just begun.
Now your spouse will become your greatest test. Until you remove that person from the place in your
heart that only God should be, it will keep hurting. Ironically, your spouse will become the tool for
this painful extraction process, until you learn that there are places in the human heart made only by—
and for—God.
Among the other lessons you may learn along this path—after a long road of loss, gain, failure,
success, and so many mistakes—is that there are at least 2 types of love. There will be some people
you love because of what you get from them: what they give you, the way they make you feel. This is
perhaps the majority of love—which is also what makes much of love so unstable. A person’s
capacity to give is inconstant and changing. Your response to what you are given is also inconstant
and changing. So if you’re chasing a feeling, you’ll always be chasing. No feeling is ever constant. If
love is dependent on this, it too becomes inconstant and changing. And just like everything in this
world, the more you chase it, the more it will run away from you.
But, once in a while, people enter your life that you love—not for what they give you—but for what
they are. The beauty you see in them is a reflection of the Creator, so you love them. Now suddenly it
isn’t about what you’re getting, but rather what you can give. This is unselfish love. This second type
of love is the rarest. And if it is based in, and not competing with, the love of God, it will also bring
about the most joy. To love in any other way is to need, to be dependent, to have expectations—all the
ingredients for misery and disappointment.
So for all those who have spent their life seeking, know that purity of any thing is found at the Source.
If it is love that you seek, seek it through God. Every other stream, not based in His love, poisons the
one who drinks from it. And the drinker will continue to drink, until the poison all but kills him. He
will continue to die more and more inside, until he stops and finds the pure Source of water.
Once you begin to see everything beautiful as only a reflection of God’s beauty, you will learn to love
in the right way: for His sake. Everything and everyone you love will be for, through and because of
Him. The foundation of such love is God. So what you hold onto will no longer be just an unstable
feeling, a fleeting emotion. And what you chase will no longer be just a temporary high. What you
hold, what you chase, what you love, will be God: the only thing stable and constant. Thereafter,
everything else will be through Him. Everything you give or take or love or don’t love, will be by
Him. Not by your nafs. It will be for Him. Not for your nafs.
This means you will love what He loves and not love what He does not love. And when you do love,
you will give to the creation—not for what you can get in return from them. You will love and you
will give, but you will be sufficed from Him. And the one, who is sufficed by God, is the richest and
most generous of all lovers. Your love will be by Him, for Him, and because of Him. That is the
liberation of the self from servitude to any created thing. And that is freedom. That is happiness.
That is love.