Love like you have never been hurt??

They say to love like you have never been hurt, and generally we feel like that is about romance. However, I think this love can apply to all four loves. Romantic, Brotherly, Friendship, and the Agape love of God. I gave each love a capital beggining letter because we often forget that love is alive and needs care and nourishment. Some may go ‘hang on, what do you mean you can apply the love like you have never been hurt quote to God’s Agape love if you believe that God doesn’t hurt people?’ That’s a good question. And it is not easy to answer. But if I am honest, I have been hurt by God. The problem is that we see the word hurt to mean something intended to be painful toward someone, yet the hurt I am talking about is not a mean or angry hurt that God caused, sometimes it’s the hurt of an unanswered prayer, the hurt of losing some of the people you love because of your Faith, maybe something happened that you feel God should have spared you from? We have all been there. Some of us don’t forgive God either. Don’t get me wrong, God never does or does not do anything without our best in mind. I lost a really close friend once, it hurt…. actually it was agony, but I did not know at the time that there was someone out there who needed me to be their friend and to give them 100% of my attention because they had been hurt and needed an undivided friendship to help them. I didn’t even notice this was God’s purpose at the time until I came across a photo of my old friend over a year later and had a bitter moment of being mad at God for not permitting me to keep this friend that I had known since I was little, that was when I saw why God had taken them away, then I saw the new friend who was happy and no longer lonely and I knew what God had done. God is not always going to show you the ‘why’ but He does always have a reason.
Oh sure, some will say ‘a loving God would let you keep both friends’ but the insecurities that my new friend had would have made that impossible.
God gives and takes away, He says no sometimes, He sometimes lets bad things happen so that we grow and learn from them and have a grounds to help others in the same situation that we were in. Like the boy attacked but not killed by the shark, he wondered why God had let that happen to him, then several years later he was surfing and a shark attacked another man near him (understand that later it was found that this beach was near a shark puping ground, sharks do not go around looking to hurt people, mostly shark incidents are accidents) the boy was the only one who went toward the man and the shark and he helped get the man to shore, possibly being the reason the man’s life was saved. That was when the boy knew the ‘why’ because of his own attack he had empathy so he went toward the danger and helped an injured man to shore. It’s hard to get over things when we feel God should have done something, our should have stopped something, but until we can learn to love like we’ve never been hurt we may never have the pleasure of seeing God’s purpose and reason, we have to remember that he is God and he knows what he’s doing.