Love is...

"Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails." -1 Corinthians 13:4-8

"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." -1 John 4:8

We love a lot of things these days. We've probably loved a lot of things for a while, I've just only been around for 22 years of it. We love a good steak and mashed potatoes. We love our girlfriends and boyfriends. We love our favorite college football teams. We love winter (or spring or fall or summer.) We love a lot of things!

I used to think of love in terms like "The Notebook" or a cute love letter on Valentine's Day. I mean, that's what love is all about right? A fairy tale ending with the someone we fall madly in love with? Finding that perfect someone you can't stand to be away from? Love used to be a feeling for me, something for me to fall in and out of. How I was wrong...

I've come to think of love more as a verb now than a noun, more as an action than an emotion. I've stopped using it as much. Not because I am loving any less, mind you. Hopefully I'm loving more in fact! But I don't want to cheapen what love is to reduce it to a simple feeling of attraction or desire. Love is SO much bigger than things I like! It requires movement and risk, not just smiles and dates.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about love recently. My youth at PHOTOS and I have been reading through Crazy Love by Francis Chan for the last couple of months on Wednesday nights. A couple of chapters ago he challenged us a bit. He asked us to read 1 Corinthians 13 and everywhere we saw "love" to replace it with our names. And let me tell you, it was a humbling experience!

But it opened my eyes to just how BIG love is! When I need to remember how big, I just look up at the night sky. I think of just how big the God of the universe is to have created the galaxies and the stars, and yet He intimately loves me and shows me exactly what love looks like. It looks like the God of all things seeing the people He created caught up in their sin, not realizing they even needed to be made clean, and coming into that world. And even bigger than that, He was arrested, beaten, abused, mocked and crucified. The God who created the stars and the moon and the oceans and the mountains became nothing more than a sacrificial lamb for a people who would never appreciate it and could never repay the debt. That is love!

Love is so much bigger than we even understand! It looks like a Samaritan, a man on the very fringes of the Israelite people, helping a traveler (most likely a Jew) he finds on the side of the road. Not satisfied with just getting him up, the Samaritan takes him to an inn and pays for all of his needs. It looks like feeding the poor, living with lepers, forgiving our enemies. It looks like a single mom working two jobs for kids she barely sees. It looks like a college senior taking weekends out of her year to hang out with and take care of a girl who she knows won't be around forever because of her terminal diagnosis. It's easy for us to love the people we like. Love requires a little more risk than just loving the people we know will love us back. Love means dropping all we have to help people who may never be able to repay us.

I read 1 Corinthians 13 and can't help but be a little ashamed at the thought that I love well. If it describes something love is, I'm usually not. If there's something love isn't, I usually am in abundance. But that's not the point I'm learning. There's a God who IS all those things! And as I become less and He becomes more, incredibly love begins to shine through more and more in my life. And as that light shines, it has nothing to do with me! It has everything to do with the God who IS love!

I'm in the season of my life where people all around me are getting engaged and married and it seems like love is all around. Marriage is the biggest "I love you" we can give to one another. But I'm realizing how big that really is. It's so much bigger than "I really like hanging out with you and you're really cute and we have great chemistry." It's more like, from today forward, we're one. And I'm committing to daily being patient, being kind, being all these things that sin tries to tell us not to be, even when it's hard and when there are troubles. It reminds me of the way God loves! No matter what, no matter how you may be hurting or may not return it, my love is never leaving you. I'm not giving up on you, no matter whether you want me to or not!

forever unfinished...