There’s a fantastic scene in Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower where Charlie (the main character) stays after class to ask for advice from his favorite teacher, Mr. Anderson. It concerns a certain girl, named Sam, with whom Charlie has fallen in love.
Charlie: “Mr. Anderson, can I ask you something?”
Mr. Anderson: “Yeah.”
Charlie: “Why do nice people choose the wrong people to date?”
Mr. Anderson: “Are we talking about anyone specific?”
Charlie: (nods)
Mr. Anderson: “Well…we accept the love we think we deserve.”
Charlie: “Can we make them know that they deserve more?”
Mr. Anderson: “We can try.”
Charlie is, as the title suggests, kind of a wallflower—a shy outsider whose broken past has left him vulnerable and withdrawn. He desperately wants to have friends—to belong—but just can’t seem to fit in. He eventually falls in with a group of other misfits where he meets Sam and begins to come out of his shell. He discovers that Sam herself has had a difficult past, looking for love and acceptance by allowing boys to get her drunk and take advantage of her. And because of that, she almost misses the true love that Charlie longs to give. She doesn’t think that she deserves better—that she deserves Charlie’s love.The story builds and in a later scene, as Sam is packing her things the night before she goes off to college, she shares an emotionally naked exchange with Charlie:
Sam: “Why do I and everyone I love pick people who treat us like we’re nothing?”
Charlie: “We accept the love we think we deserve.”
I’ve known a lot of people like this; I’ve been a person like this. We just accept dysfunction and disappointment because deep down we feel that we aren’t deserving of anything better. So many kids come from broken homes where the father or the mother weren’t present, or didn’t make them feel loved or wanted or deserving of anything good. These kids then carry those wounds with them into friendships, relationships, marriages and careers. They are stuck because they believe they don’t deserve better.
Everyone is deserving of love—real love; that which is patient and kind, isn’t envious or proud, that isn’t dishonoring or easily angered, that keeps no record of wrongs, that doesn’t delight in evil but in truth, that protects, trust, hopes, and perseveres. That’s love. And nobody deserves less, no matter what has been done to them or what they have done to themselves.
The world would tell you otherwise; that love is conditional and based upon cause and effect. You do this, you get love; you do that, you don’t deserve it. Worth becomes a leveraging tool of power and control. You aren’t worthy of my affections, my love, my attention, my respect, and you aren’t going to find any of that anywhere else. There aren’t many things which are more damaging than that.
But we are created in His image, and God is love. I am told to love Him with everything I am and to also love my neighbor as myself. Others deserve love because God extended it to me. He thinks I deserve love so much that even while I was still swimming in my sin, God sent Jesus to live in a perfect relationship with the Creator—the kind that neither I nor any of us could ever truly live. And it’s because of Jesus’ passionate love, faithfulness and innocence (even unto death) that I am now seen as righteous. I receive an even deeper love than I should deserve. It is because of this love that I understand the need to also give it to others.
On a personal note, I often struggle in my Christian faith with the acceptance of God’s offering of what I consider to be an overwhelmingly undeserved love. Because of horrible choices I make, because of things I do/don’t do/say/don’t say, and because of the way that I disrespect and dishonor the One to whom I should be giving all of myself, I often feel like Sam. I pick the conventional wisdom of the world, who often treats me like I am nothing, rather than instead embracing the love that God longs to lavish upon me. Because of my fallen nature and self-centeredness, the only thing that I should be deserving of is God’s righteous judgment—not of love.
There’s a difference between being a righteous judge who has standards of rights and wrongs, and one who demonstrates true love, yet they are intertwined. It is because of love that boundaries are drawn and consequences established. Love says, “I love you so much, and I know the best way for you to live; if you choose to go outside of that, there are consequences. But I still love you, and like the father to the Prodigal Son, I will always be here with open arms to forgive and embrace you.”
It’s a difficult thing for me to wrap my mind/heart around, but rather than pick someone who treats me like I am nothing, my heart leaps at the thought of being chosen by someone who wishes to treat me as though I was His everything.
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