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Rihanna has a way of making the most interesting videos about the tension of love. Her video with Eminem, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uelHwf8o7_U" target="_blank">Love The Way You Lie</a>, explored a deep tension of trying to love in a broken world.  We live in relationships with people, searching for someone who will love us, who will speak to something deep within our soul that says, "You are worth it." To find it is intoxicating.  It is the ever present feeling of love that comes from the affections of the other. In many ways, to be loved feels like salvation.

But live in relationship is to feel it is to risk the possibility of losing it.  And when we do, it becomes a place of unspeakable suffering. Was the original love ever true.  The loss of love reminds us of our search, and the original desire that we longed to quench.  It's easy to want to hold onto that old memory, desiring to go back to the old places.  In this video <em>We Found Love</em>, a female voice speaks to that tension.  She says:

<em>It's like screaming and no one can hear.</em>
<em>You almost feel ashamed, that someone could be that important, </em>
<em>that without them, you feel like nothing.</em>
<em>Noone will ever understand how much it hurts.</em>
<em>You feel hopeless, like nothing can save you.</em>
<em>And when it's over, when it's gone, you almost wish that you could have all that bad stuff back, </em>
<em>so you can have the good.</em>

The risk of love is in the possibility that someone may not love you back. This is also the risk of our humanity, that God may not love us back.  And when our present circumstances suggest that God has left the building, it's hard to hold on.  It's hard to believe that it was ever true in the first place.

I wonder if this is why it's called faith.  Because there is so much more evidence that God is not present in our lives, that the original lie that <a href="http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen%201:31&amp;version=MSG" target="_blank">we really aren't that good</a> is somehow true. Faith requires us to see beyond our present circumstance, pain and suffering to hold onto something magically impossible: that God really loves us even when we don't feel it.