This post took a long time to write and a really long time to start writing. It’s a long post dealing with a large topic, one of which I can only barely brush the surface. It’s such a big topic that even with the little part I’m trying to touch on, I’m not sure I represented in the most organized manner. It’s controversial, in many ways, and open to much discussion. Love is such a huge part of the Christian life, yet we tend to shy away from in depth talks about it. I really don’t know why. Maybe it’s just me and that’s an inaccurate reflection.
Over the last year and a half, one of my main topics of meditation has been love. As a child, I knew love more as others loving me. I grew up knowing the Bible verses: God is love, 1 Cor 13, love your neighbor as yourself. While I would say I loved my parents, my siblings, my friends, it was never a truly deep love. Love is unselfish, caring only and fully for the other person, and I’ve never lived up to that. I still haven't (how could I, an imperfect person, experience perfect love towards others?) but I've gotten closer through practice and God's grace.
I want to start with a definition of love that has influenced a lot of my thought processes these last months. Love: intentionally and intelligently choosing what is best for the other person. This is the definition given at Oasis last year, and it stuck with me a lot more than I expected it would. It’s a definition that can be applied to all relationships: friends, enemies, romances, and family. It crosses great distances, differences, and divides.
First I want to go through some of the qualities of love that have stuck out to me the most, either by example or by study. By demonstration, a good friend has taught me that love is unconditional – it is caring and understanding, it listens without judging, without thinking less, without disapproving, and it is so because it is full of God. Love is patient, and, often, that patience is only possible with God’s help. Love is also not always spilling-over-joyous love, the gooey love our culture associates with romance; it is often a deep-seated honoring love. As Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, we love by being patient, kind, not envious, not boastful, not prideful. By honouring and looking to the other’s good before our own. We try not to be angry and irritable, and we keep no record of wrongs. We forgive and forget. We always protect, always trust, always hope, and always persevere. These qualities we choose to try by God’s grace. But love isn't always easy. Just because you hold knowledge of what it's supposed to look like in your head doesn't necessarily mean your actions will always reflect that.
Now I’m going to expand on something I’ve touched on a couple of times in the past two paragraphs: love isn’t a feeling, it’s a choice. Josh McDowell defines love this way: to nurture (bring maturity to) and to cherish (care for and protect). His definition is probably the result of many years of study and reflection – it’s certainly much more developed than mine is. Maybe 50 years down the road I’ll get around to defining love. For now, I’m starting with the idea that love is a choice. Society today has really tried to alter love to only include the feeling part of it, and that definition is probably a cause of many of our problems. How can we love our coworker if we really don’t like him? Well, my parents always told my siblings and me that we always had to love each other, even when we didn’t like each other. In fact, I’m going to paraphrase C.S. Lewis here. I’ve just been reading his book Mere Christianity, and I think he explains this much better than I ever have. I am told to love my neighbor as I love myself. Well, how do I love myself? I certainly don’t love myself because I’m always nice, always good. In fact, I love myself in spite of being a rather awful person at times. So love isn’t based on liking a person. C.S. Lewis says love is wishing your neighbor good – I say love is a choice. Choose it or not.
What does this choice look like? Because love is a choice, it applies to those whom we don't want to love as well. Even when we carry hurt against someone, we cannot abandon him or her in favor of a grudge. Love is about the other person. What is best for him? How can you best serve her? What does the other person want and need? It is with the Lord's help that it can be all about the other person, from our hearts to our heads to our actions. Even through hurt and distance and separation, we can and should still make the choice to love.
Love, in many ways, is simply deciding to put the other person first. This journey of love started for me first by observing love in others, then by deciding to choose to love one person, then by gradually applying the concept of love as a choice to more and more people. Some people have been harder to love than others; some people I haven’t gotten there yet. I ask God to change my heart, show me how to best love a person, and a couple of times He has done so in bigger ways than I was expecting. In other instances, He’s still working on my stubborn, sinful heart. I imagine, though, that He has great works of love in my future, in one way or another.
