Love

With Valentine’s Day drawing near, our thoughts turn towards love.  Paul wrote a nice description of what love is and what love isn’t.  Though no one except God is an expert on love, for He is love, we learn from our life’s experiences about this wonderful vehicle of our life’s dreams.  I’d like to share some thoughts about this.

We often wonder if love is delusional, and if the endurance of love depends on a mixture of denial and self-interest.  For the world, perhaps that is true.  For the Christian, we should be able to separate out our interests, and if the relationship is poor, our denial.  In the long run, denial will buy us time, but not happiness nor fulfillment.  Inside we will always feel a bit robbed of what we want, and we will know in our inner person that something is wrong.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth (1 Cor 13:6).  When we deny that there are problems in our imperfect human relationships, it is actually we who are robbing the relationship of the benefits that come through rejoicing in the truth.  Though focusing on the problems and trying to fix them may seem the only door to happiness in our relationships, love goes in an entirely different direction.  Love isn’t a sure way to change the other person.  Though love hopes for the good of the other person, love carries within it the deep and strong desire to stick with him or her in the hard times.  The benefit of rejoicing in the truth isn’t that the pain of painful truth is good for us in some way; it is that the truth is mixed with God’s love in a powerful presence of His nature as He brings words, prayers and righteous acts into the relationship.  Love is strong enough to endure pain, and triumph.

Paul also writes that love always protects, trusts, hopes and perseveres (1 Cor 13:7).  A person who loves seeks to protect the weaker brother or sister, longing for Christ’s nature to be formed in them.  The truth is not a club to beat the other person with, nor a whip to motivate them.  The truth becomes an inner strength that motivates the stronger Christian to have compassion for the weaker.  Love trusts this process and hopes in God’s ability to work in the relationship for the good of both people.  And though denial can help us to last longer in a dysfunctional relationship, perseverance can only come with loving another person so much that the goal of mutually shared and triumphant love becomes a greater prize than the temporary anesthesia of blocking out the pain.

When we choose to join our lives with another person, love will endure because of the commitment each person makes towards the other.  Without commitment, love cannot endure the trials.  Do we need blind and delusional love in order to enter into such a relationship? Not at all.  We need God’s love.  I am convinced that, because God first loved us, His love enables us to love as He does (1 Jn 4:19).  He is committed to us.  To paraphrase Renee Zellweger’s quote from the movie “Jerry McGuire”, God completes us (Phil 1:6).  This is His hope, that we will be formed by love.  In the same manner, let us live in our relationships with the hope that our love will bring our relationships into perfection.  Amen.