These White-Knuckled Grips.

We humans tend to measure the depth of our loves by how tightly we grip them.I'll be the first to admit that my heart is a vault. Favorite songs, stories, people, and places are tagged with a kind of possessive love there, buried away in the deepest caves it can create. I keep these white-knuckled grips on the things I love the most. And jealousy comes rushing in whenever someone else wants to share in those loves with me.At first glance, it doesn't seem so heinous. This mine-not-yours mentality is a little endearing even, and it hints at a desire sown into our bones to emulate our Creator God, who broods over us in His holy jealousy (Exodus 34:14). But there's a discrepancy between ours and His: the proneness I've detected within myself to feel possessive is nowhere near holy; at best it's a severely fractured and incomplete reflection of God's.Usually, jealousy indicates a desire for what we do not, cannot, or should not have. But when God tells Moses, "[My] name is Jealous," there is something entirely different being described. The Maker of all things, Giver of life, and Lover of our souls cannot conjure up a desire for things He does not, cannot, or should not have; "all things were created through Him and for Him" (Colossians 1:16). The One who sees us yet loves us, who knows us yet does not give us up—that God is Jealousy in its fullest, fiercest, most pure and fatherly form.So far from wanting what He cannot have, God wants back what belongs to Him. He wants us, each person that He created and brought into existence in acts of perfect love. Because we belong to Him; because He is eager to give us the sweetness of life that comes from closeness with Him; because, without Him, we only find death and depression and darkness, God must have us. He is jealous to give us the fullness of life and to give us Himself (John 10:10).But His request is simply that we receive, not emulate. We can hardly even comprehend His faultless Jealousy, much less put it into practice in our own lives. In fact, the Bible gives us the opposite directive: share. Be generous. There are lights to let shine and cities to stop hiding! There is good news to share, and the ends of the earth waiting to hear.Generosity can get so tangled in our efforts to translate it, though. Let's give our money away, but not to those who will waste it. Let's share the Gospel, but not with people we presume will mock it. A religion like that is so disinteresting to God; our discernment of who and how much is not what He wants. Christ's commands to share, love freely, and live generously are not just instructions for how to treat others; they are prescriptions for our own hearts.In all His eternal ingenuity, God created sharing to be a double-cure so that, in the very act of giving away, we would receive. When we unclench our fists, our hearts begin to unfold. In sharing, our hearts are renovated, and every vault and cave where we have buried our loves are unlocked. That openness of heart is what He craves for us. He is jealous for us to have richness, satisfaction, and abundance of life.So, we can blame our possessive disposition on culture or on circumstance (it does seem like the world in which we live has forgotten how to let love breathe). But if the Church, who is the bride of Jesus Christ and recipient of the most perfect love this world has ever been offered—if the Church cannot give as she has been given and love as she has been loved, how can we expect the world to loosen its white-knuckled grips?words by Delaney Young and photo by Sara Beth Pritchard