Love is a constant interrogation.

My eyes tripped over this line, they got up and attempted to run over it again; then stopped with the period and dashed back to the beginning to try one more time. Visions of bright lights and chain-smoking inspectors rattling off angry questions, pictures of suavely confident secret agents gently probing, before suddenly turning angry and spewing forth horrible threats, filled my mind. But the author was ready for these interpretations, these attacks based on one-dimensional preconceptions. Every apex has its nadir, and oft times the nadir is mistaken for the apex…

The more I thought about the idea of Love as an Interrogation, the better I was captivated by it. I imagine God as this incredibly curious Divinity; naturally all-knowing, yet at the same time consistently pursuing—eager for every tidbit of knowledge and understanding about my heart, my desires, my fears, and my shortcomings. After all, He’s numbered every hair on my head—and with a detail oriented approach like that, one can easily see how God would be gently, perhaps fiercely at times, compassionate and loving in His ongoing Interrogation of us.

Of course, if God’s love is Interrogatory, mine should be too. And, perhaps like you, I had an idea of what this might look like—but it wasn’t good. I imagined a distrustful, domineering husband, always demanding to know where his wife had been or what she was doing—forcing his way into every corner of surfacy facts, asserting his power, demanding to know. But that conception is the Nadir, and I had been warned not to mistake it for the real thing. Instead, the loving interrogation that I should aspire to is that of deeply desiring to know and understand my wife’s heart, to seek it out, not maliciously or suspiciously, but interestedly and curiously. Love wants to know everything. Love wants to find out about pain and joy, sorrow and happiness, dreams and failures; it wants to know these things and it wants to come along side and live in the midst of this delicately vibrant reality. Love truly is a constant Interrogation.