Love

My last post was garbled, unorganized, not altogether and probably didn't communicate quite what I wanted to say, so I deleted it. I thought about the topic a bit more over course of these last two days, and here's what I've got to say...

Love is complicated and hard to define. It can be the most destructive or most life giving of all emotions. God intended love to be awesome, deep, and multi-dimensional. Question is at what point a person really loves someone.

First of all, I believe the source of love is God. If we don’t know God, we don’t know what true love is. (Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 1 John 4:8) God’s love is too vast and too complicated to understand, because there is no logical, rational reason for him choosing to love us. But he does. So God’s love was choice. And because God created love, I believe our love for Him and for others is choice.

Love isn’t selfish and isn’t self gratifying. The world wants to believe that love comes from in the mind, that it can come sporadically, and that it comes uncontrollably without any effort on our part. That is the idea of “falling in love”. The truth is that love of all kinds comes through choice. It may be easier to love certain people because of attraction, but we still have to make the effort.

I think Charles Creech summed it up pretty well:

“True love is the process of extending yourself to others. The world’s love is the process of selfishly extracting the things from others it believes will make it happy. Degrees of love are based on different levels of giving yourself to others within the proper boundaries. Degrees of love are not based on different levels of intense emotion. The world believes that one can “fall in love”. However, God has commanded us to love and we cannot just helplessly fall into His will. There are individuals that provide a greater source of external motivation for us to love them, but we must still make the choice to love within the bounds of truth. The truth is that we are to love even our enemies, the people that hate us and use us.”

I believe love at first sight might just be a thing of this world. God may show us who he intends for us to spend our lives with, but the attraction (even if strong) is not yet love. Love itself takes time, energy, and work to (if not create and secure itself) maintain. That I can and will stand to, for in this sinful world nothing is perfect, not even the deepest love between two people.

Love is by far the strongest, most powerful of all feelings when at its highest intensity. If we misperceive love, it can lead us down a path where we will most likely fall and fall hard. If we treat love as an attraction or desire, and work to feed it to ourselves, nothing good will come of it, for that’s not how God intended it. We should feed ourselves with God’s love, and then give that love to others.

Unfortunately for those who like things concrete and simple, love is not one of those things. For God is indefinable, and God is love. God’s love for us is inexplicable and deeper than we can fathom. And it’s this love that we seek to receive and hopefully seek to give. While our love is not nearly as vast or complex as His, it certainly is still too complicated for us to fully explain or comprehend. Like God, the mystery and complexity is part of what makes it so great.