Unconditional Love
The summit of this climb is the only room on it that nobody has ever lived in.
The boy came to them at fourteen with a trash bag of clothes and a file three inches thick, and he stole from them the first month. Cash from the man's dresser. They kept him. He stole again at Christmas, the wife's ring this time, pawned, recovered, and they kept him, and the man said the thing he had decided to say before the boy ever arrived: nothing you do gets you sent back. The third time was the truck, at sixteen, taken at night and found in a ditch two counties over with the boy in it, and the man drove the two counties and brought him home and kept him.
The fourth time he could not. He does not know to this day exactly what it was about the fourth time, a smaller thing than the truck, something said to his wife, and he found that the sentence he had decided on at the start was not in him anymore. He had meant it. He had a number and had not known the number until the boy reached it. He drove the boy to the next placement himself and did not speak, and sat in the lot afterward for a long time.
The boy is thirty now, and sober, and came to find him last year, and said: "You lasted three. Nobody else lasted one." The man took it, because it was kindly meant and because it was true. He also knew what the boy did not, which was that three was the exact height of his love, measured to the inch on a Tuesday, and that he had found out where the summit of this mountain was by finding out where he stopped.
The room before this one extended grace once, at cost, toward one man who had done the wounding, and then stood the question up at full height: who can do this always, to every offender, at every offense, with the love never once flinching? That is the summit, and the climb ends here, past the soil and the brother and the fire, past the turn, past the root and the crown. At the far end of all of it stands the highest form of love there is: unconditional, holy, giving, with nothing in the beloved to point to as the reason and nothing the beloved can do to end it. The old word is agape. It is not a higher gear in the range of human feeling. It is a different category of love entirely, and the foster father found its lower edge by hitting his own ceiling at three, which is more than most men ever climb.
This is the last room on the walk and no man dwells in it. Men come here, receive here, and carry something back down. The page above said a man would find out at the top who had been standing there the whole time, and the finding out is this room's only real business. Everything else on the page is a description of a love that is not a man's to produce, so that he knows it when he meets it coming the other direction.
Unconditional Love
"For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed"
— Isaiah 54:10
The mountains may depart. The prophet does not pick a small thing to measure the love against; he picks the one thing in his world that did not move, and says the love is more fixed than that. Shall not depart from you. It is said to a people who had departed from him, repeatedly, which is the only context in which the sentence means anything, and it is the summit of this climb in one line: a love whose continuance has nothing to do with the conduct of the one loved. Every love below this one has a condition somewhere in it, however deep, and a man finds the condition by reaching it. This one has none, and the room's whole weight rests on a single fact: the sentence was not spoken by a man.
Love Without a Floor
Unconditional love is love with no conditions attached to its continuance. It is not love without standards and not love that ignores behavior; it is love whose continuing does not depend on the behavior meeting the standard. What changes when the standard is broken is not the love but the expression of it, which is where the last section of this room turns.
Most love carries conditions it never states. A man will love his wife as long as she loves him back, his brother as long as the betrayal is not too deep, his son as long as the son does not reach the number. These are not failures of character. They are the natural limits of a love run by a creature who has to protect himself to keep going, and the foster father was not a worse man for having a number. He was a man. The difference between conditional and unconditional love is not intensity; conditional love can be fierce while the conditions hold and gone the week they break. The difference is consistency, present when the conditions are met and present when they are not, and only what is consistent can be trusted, and only what can be trusted can hold anything up for long.
The Summit Faces Down
Here the map turns over. Every love on the climb went up: the child reaching for the parent, the man reaching for a brother, the fire reaching for the beloved, the turn and the root and the crown all a man becoming more than he was. It would be natural to think the summit is the top of that same staircase, that a man who climbs far enough arrives.
He does not arrive, because this love never climbed. It came down. "he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" — Philippians 2:8. Humbled himself. The highest love in existence is a love that descended, from the throne to a feeding trough to a Roman execution, from the one who lacked nothing toward the men who could not come up. The summit of this mountain has a cross on it, and the cross is not a monument to the greatest climb. It is the footprint of the greatest descent. The lowest point and the highest turn out to be the same point, and a man who finally stands at the peak finds that the whole climb was walking up a road God had already walked down.
That is why no man dwells here. The summit is not a height a man reaches. It is an altitude only one Being has ever held, because only a love that needs nothing, depends on nothing, and draws from a source that does not run dry can love without conditions, always, toward everyone. The foster father ran dry on a Tuesday. He was never going to not run dry. He was built with a bottom to the well, and the only one who is not is the one who came down.
The Hands Held Out All Day
The clearest picture of what this love does is not a rescue. It is a posture, held for a very long time toward people who are not turning around.
"I spread out my hands all the day to a rebellious people, who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices" — Isaiah 65:2. All the day. Hands spread out. Not for an afternoon; for the duration, toward people walking the other way, and Paul quoted the line to the Romans to say the posture had not changed in seven hundred years. The Lord stood on a hill and said it over the city that was about to kill him: "How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" — Matthew 23:37. How often. And then, drawing near on the last approach, "he wept over it" — Luke 19:41. Wept, over the city, with the cross five days out. That is not a love that withdraws when it is not received. It stands there with its hands out and weeps and keeps them out.
God put the whole posture into a promise about his own king's descendants, and it is the one passage a man should read who thinks unconditional means consequence-free: "If his children forsake my law... then I will punish their transgression with the rod and their iniquity with stripes, but I will not remove from him my steadfast love or be false to my faithfulness" — Psalm 89:30-33. The rod, and the steadfast love, in one sentence, both held at full strength. The punishment is real. The love is not removed. And the invitation at the end of every one of the prophets' indictments is the same invitation, and it is addressed to the guilty by name: "Return, O faithless sons; I will heal your faithlessness" — Jeremiah 3:22. Faithless sons. Still sons. Still invited. The hands are still out.
Because, With Nothing After It
Every love below the summit points at something in the beloved as its reason. This one gives a reason and the reason is itself. "Yet the LORD set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them" — Deuteronomy 10:15. Set his heart. No cause given in the fathers. "Because the LORD loved Israel forever, he has made you king" — 1 Kings 10:9. Because he loved. A pagan queen said that, standing in Solomon's court, and got the theology exactly right. And the strangest one, about a curse turned into a blessing for no reason the text will supply: "because the LORD your God loved you" — Deuteronomy 23:5. Because he loved you. The sentence stops there. There is no second clause.
Paul took the same because and put it at the one moment when there was least in the object to love: "because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive" — Ephesians 2:4-5. Even when we were dead. Not when we were promising. Dead. And John, opening the last book, puts the whole thing in the present tense, as a thing still going on: "To him who loves us and has freed us" — Revelation 1:5. Loves us. Present tense, after the freeing, as if the freeing were the smaller of the two. A man looking for the condition on this love, the thing in himself that earned it or could lose it, will not find one. That is not an oversight in the text. It is the summit.
Kind to the Ungrateful
The love at the top is not reserved for the ones who climbed. It falls on everyone, which is the part the climbing man finds hardest to take. The Lord said the Father sends rain on the just and the unjust, and then said why that matters for a man's own love: "for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil" — Luke 6:35. The ungrateful and the evil. Kind to them. Not tolerant of them; kind. "The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made" — Psalm 145:9. Over all. The boy who stole the ring was under that mercy on the night he pawned it.
And then the command, which is the sentence that ends every man's hope of producing this love from his own supply: "You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" — Matthew 5:48. As your heavenly Father. That is the altitude. Not try hard, not do better than the pagans; perfect, as he is. A man who reads that command honestly finds out in the same moment that he is being told to love at the summit and that he cannot, and both of those are true, and the gap between them is where the next section lives.
Love That Does Not Fail
Paul's great chapter on love ends on two words every wedding reads and no married couple can keep: it never fails. Never. Not rarely, not less often than other love. Never, because this love is not held up by the things that hold human love up, by return and gratitude and the beloved being worth it. It is held up by God, who does not fail, and a man who draws from that source instead of his own has access to a consistency no human being produces alone.
Israel had a liturgy for it, one line, sung twenty-six times in one psalm, once for every act in the nation's history including the ones that were judgments: "for his steadfast love endures forever" — Psalm 136:1. Twenty-six times. The same answer to every verse, whether the verse was the Red Sea or the wilderness. "But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him" — Psalm 103:17. From everlasting to everlasting. It has no beginning for a man to have earned and no end for him to have reached. And the psalmist, having looked at that, said the only sane thing a creature can say about a love that size: "How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings" — Psalm 36:7. Take refuge. Not produce it. Get under it.
The Command and the Supply
This love is commanded, and the standard is not vague: as I have loved you. Which means at cost, without condition, toward men who will fail within hours of hearing it, because that is who heard it first. A man keeping that command is not doing it from his own reserves. He cannot. The command assumes a prior receipt.
John gave the order of operations twice in one paragraph so that nobody could reverse it. "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us" — 1 John 4:9-10. Not that we have loved God. The direction is fixed; the love comes down first, and whatever a man gives after that is the return current. And the Lord, on the last night, prayed for the supply by name: "that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them" — John 17:26. The love with which you have loved me. In them. The summit's own love, the one that has never had a condition on it, requested for men who were about to scatter, so that it would be in them. A man who knows he is loved without conditions, who has settled that his standing does not rise and fall with his performance, has a source to draw from that the man who has not received it cannot reach. The foster father had three in him. What is prayed for in that sentence is not a bigger number. It is the one love that has no number at all, put inside a man who does.
Unconditional and Just
Unconditional love is not unconditional approval of every act, and the confusion is the most common error about the summit. The same God who loves without conditions disciplines, and Scripture says the discipline is the love, applied: the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and every son he receives. A father who lets his son destroy himself to avoid the discomfort of intervening does not love his son more than the father who steps in. He loves him less. He has put his own comfort above the boy's good and called the result acceptance.
Just love is unconditional love expressed with enough seriousness to do what is actually needed instead of what is comfortable. The love does not change with the behavior. The expression of it, including correction and consequence and the next placement, answers to what the situation requires. God holds both in one sentence without strain: "Return, faithless Israel, declares the LORD. I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful... I will not be angry forever" — Jeremiah 3:12. Not forever. There was anger, and it was earned, and it had an end that the love did not have. A man who can hold both at once, the love that does not move and the response that does, is a man whose people can trust him at the deepest level. They know he will not leave them. They know he will not lie to them. Both at once is the rarest thing a man offers, and it is a copy, at his own altitude, of a thing he saw at the summit and did not make.
How Men Mistake the Summit
The man who thinks he dwells here. He believes his love for his wife or his children is unconditional, and he has never been to the fourth time. He has a number. Everyone does. He will find it on a Tuesday.
The man who stops at his ceiling and calls it the top. He lasted three and concluded that three is what love is. He has measured the summit by his own height, which is the one instrument that cannot measure it.
The man who reads unconditional as consequence-free. He has never used the rod because he thinks the rod is the opposite of the love, so his children have had his approval and never once his correction, and they do not trust either.
The man who tries to produce it. He is attempting to love at the summit from his own supply, and he is exhausted, and the exhaustion is the proof that he has not yet received the thing he is trying to give.
The man who never looks up. He has climbed the whole mountain as an achievement and arrived at the top expecting a view, and he has not noticed the footprints coming down the road he came up.
The foster father in the lot. He found his number on a Tuesday, drove the boy himself, and sat in the lot afterward for a long time. He found out exactly where the summit is by finding out exactly where he stops, and that is not nothing. It is where every man finds it.
Three Questions at the Ceiling
TRUTH: What is a man's number, and has he met it yet? Not what he says his love is. The fourth time, the thing said to his wife, the inch where he stopped. A man who does not know his number has not been tested to it, and should not confuse that with not having one.
LOVE: Who in his life is past the number, and what is the posture of his hands toward them? Spread out all day, or folded. A man cannot produce the love that stays, but he can decide, every morning, which way his hands are pointed while he waits for the supply.
LAW: Where has he withheld the rod and called it love, or withheld the love and called it the rod? He is answerable for both halves of one sentence, the discipline and the steadfast love, and a man who keeps only one of them has not been just. He has been comfortable.
Who Was Standing at the Top
A man comes up the whole way for this. He started in soil he did not choose, crossed level ground to a brother, climbed through fire, turned his attention off himself and got up from the chair, buried his costs where no one saw, and learned to move downhill toward the man who wounded him. He arrives at the summit with everything the climb put in him, and he finds the room empty of any man, and the road he came up marked with footprints going the other way.
The love he was climbing toward had been coming down to meet him the entire time. That is what the man finds at the top, and it changes the meaning of the climb without erasing a step of it. He did not reach the summit by climbing; he reached the place where he could see that the summit had already come to where he started, to the soil, to the doorway at two in the morning, to the garage and the driveway and the impound lot, and that every true form of love he met on the way up was a small picture of the one that came down. The foster father lasted three. The one who came down has never once reached a fourth time he could not keep, with any man, and the boy with the trash bag was under that love in the ditch two counties over, and so was the man sitting in the lot who had run out. A man who has stood here does not leave as a man who possesses this love. He leaves as a man who has been given it, and knows now where to go when his own runs out at three.
The Man Who Comes Down the Mountain
No man dwells at the summit, and no man who has stood here leaves the same. He goes back down into his house, his marriage, his brotherhood, not as a man who holds unconditional love but as a man who has received it and has somewhere to draw from. He can give without accounting for what comes back. He can stay when staying costs. He can love the people who are hard to love, because he was loved that way himself, and he knows what it cost the one who did it. What the walk leaves in him, the page above already named, and he will carry it down without needing to call it anything.
But he has one stop before his own kitchen, and the climb has made him ready for it in a way he was not at the trailhead. He has now seen the real article at every altitude: in the soil, on level ground, in the fire, at the turn, under the ground, on the far side of a wound, and at a summit that came down. He knows what each one looks like when it is genuine. What he has not yet done, with his own people's names in the rows, is find out how much of what he has been calling love for twenty years was the genuine article and how much was wearing its clothes. The summit gave, and needed nothing back. The man coming down should find out, before he reaches his own table, how much of what he calls love has been needing.