WHAT DOES REAL LOVE LOOK LIKE?

Love Focused: Living Life to the Fullest, by Bob and Judy Hughes. Laguna Hills, CA: Crossroads Publishing, 2008, 223 pages. (Available at lovefocused.com)

Bob Hughes saved our marriage.

That’s not strictly true, but it’s close to how I feel. Bob is certainly God’s instrument who helped us understand why our marriage was falling apart and how we could establish it on a foundation of love. That explains the sense of gratitude and anticipation I felt as I began reading this book, and why my review may appear less than objective. Of course God used others, notably our family, to show us that our marriage had bottomed out. But it was Bob who helped us understand that the bottoming out occurred on a mountain of self-absorption. We met him in 1989 after returning from Africa. We had been married nearly twenty years, (most of them in missionary service). Now we were disheartened and bewildered, our life in turmoil, with one son in open rebellion and our love for one another surely over. Divorce was no option for us: instead, we were quietly ready to live together—separately.

Michelle and I spent many weeks counseling with Bob. In the years since, one thing has remained clear as crystal: A man wants to fix things, but relationships can’t be fixed like a broken chair. There was nothing I could do—or Bob could say—that would make Michelle love me. All I could control was my own decision to love Michelle as Christ loves the church—and depend on God to do that. He told Michelle that she also needed to love rather than hold out for me to change. This is the basic command, the basic doctrine of all Scripture—to love God and others. Bob took pains to help my donkey brain grasp this. At the same time, he warned me that there was no guaranteeing the outcome: I could not control her response—I couldn’t really control anything in the world around me, not even God. Perhaps God would see fit to rekindle our love, and he did—not because I could obligate him, but because the Father delights to bless his children, and his love is gratuitous and free, not conditional.

It’s been twenty years since the dark went to light in our marriage. Bob has now been a Christian counselor for some thirty years, and has written Love Focused with his wife Judy. Those additional years of trench warfare (i.e., counseling) have surely crystallized what God taught them about what it means to love and what prevents us from living out John Lennon’s simple solution (“All we need is….”). Loving God and loving others is still the message of the Scriptures, how to make it real is the message that Bob and Judy are seeking to communicate. The effective Christian life is what they call “the love-focused life.” That message is as simple as the idealistic Beatle’s song; however the getting there and the living there are not quite so evident. Living Love Focused is really possible, achievable by grace—and more necessary than ever. Unfortunately, its importance has been obscured, like so much else in “mere Christianity,” by internecine struggle and little attention to God’s call to justice, mercy, and humility.

Learning to live the love-focused life, the Hughes write, is about undergoing a “dramatic shift in our understanding…. exposing a fundamental flaw in our thinking about life that keeps us living on a treadmill of pressure and fear….” This thinking must change. The reward is great: “A life of love leaves no regrets….” (pp 3-4).

Those who honestly seek to love will intuitively realize how miserably we fail at it: the more honest the look, the more self-focus we recognize. So what does real love look like? How do we get there?

The “getting there” is one of the great strengths of this book. Using simple language, the Hughes help us to discover what drives us, what’s behind our behavior and emotions. One foundational fact to know is that our behavior and emotions are a direct result of what we think and believe. Our beliefs drive our goals and purposes, which in turn drive what we do. We each try to live in a way that ensures that we achieve the goal of getting our needs met. However, what we think of as “needs” are often only desires, however legitimate. Some examples are: gaining love, approval, and respect, being valued and having purpose, coping with the pain in our world. None of us can truly control that these will be met—but we still try, often apart from any real dependence on God. The long-term outcome is that we invariably hurt others (and ourselves) in the effort.

You may not like what I’m about to say. Remember that Bob is a “Christian counselor,” ergo those who have sat in his office for thirty years with failed lives are mostly professing Christians. Ouch! Bob and Judy explain that the hidden goals even Christians pursue are what they call “outcome-focused goals” (i.e., getting others to meet the needs we think we have). We do this generally without even being conscious of it. These outcome-focused goals include: keeping others happy, getting our spouse to change, getting our kids to turn out okay. Outcome-focused goals—over which we have no control—keep us focused on ourselves. “Love-focused goals,” by contrast, are things we do have a measure of control over. Some of these are: loving others as best we can, being a good husband/wife, teaching our children God’s way. (He also calls these “process-focused” goals). Bob and Judy provide clear and illuminating—and convicting—discussions of strategies we use to get our “needs” met, to meet self-focused goals. These include: self-protection (e.g., fear, avoidance, addictions), seeking our own fulfillment (e.g., status-seeking), control (e.g., anger), perfectionism, and others. Bob’s abundant experience in dealing with individuals, couples, and “grown-up kids” lends authority to describe how we insidiously manipulate and ignore Scripture. By the time you read through these pages, you should be able to identify some of these in your life and be shaken enough to seek the Lord in overcoming them.

It may seem trite to suggest that the answer to these is to trust God, love him and love others. Bob and Judy are a bit more specific than that. They first point out that, if we are to be love-focused, it’s our thinking that has to change (since it’s our thinking that drives what we do). The bottom-line of our failure to love is that we don’t really think God’s love and grace are enough. This lack is endemic in the church. It shows up in legalism and perfectionism—a performance mindset that tragically afflicts all those who live their lives in the “conditional love” of God. Jerry Bridges recently noted that the most dedicated Christians are more afflicted with this than others. The Hughes point out that trusting God’s love and grace often comes down to a conscious decision: His love and grace are enough.

If there is anything missing here, it would be—in my opinion—a discussion on why Christians can know that God’s love is not conditional and why we can be confident in his love and grace as our Father, (something like what Paul wrote in Ephesians 1-3).

This is, in any case, a timely book. Its simple message is needed and overdue for the church—indeed, for all (even disillusioned 60s “love children”). Bob and Judy Hughes have provided practical help for Christians to understand their self-focus, begin to put it off, and live love focused.