On Love
Ok…..Love ramblings.
I guess it only makes sense. It’s 7:30 on Feb. 14th, 2016. Valentines Day. Bleh. Barf. Yay. Right?
Even in my seriously-dating life or married life, I didn’t like this day. What’s beautiful to some is painful to others and a brilliant excuse to drink too much, eat too much chocolate, and blow money on over-priced, under-stuffed, cheesy Teddy bears, rush the movie theaters for drenched-in-fake-butter popcorn, and wait way too long to get into any and all restaurants.
It can be an opportunity to express your love for someone cupid hath struck with his arrow but it seems to me that this sort of expression ought to simply be something we “do” or come by naturally. One doesn’t need mid-February to roll around to tell someone they love them or conjure the courage to propose. Chocolate is on the shelf all year long. Our loved ones surround us. Eros is fresh with the day — each day.
And then there’s the love chapter…….Over-used at most weddings. I think I’d prefer to have this one preached at my funeral. I’d rather this chapter of scripture define my whole life than just certain moments in it.
1 Corinthians 13:
13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
I have done “love” right and wrong in my life. I have done love for the sake of love — love for not being lonely — love despite my conscience — love only because someone else has loved not because I actually love — love for a parent, friend, child, man — love. And then “in love” which is a totally different story altogether.
I’ve done the kind of love that changes the trajectory of one’s life. When I went to seminary, I really had no interest in coming home. I loved my family, but the conference didn’t seem too terribly interested in young people in ministry nor did it seem a fruitful place for women in ministry (at the time at least) and no one had really reached out to me to give me any inkling that I was valued. I was looking at S. GA or Florida or maybe somewhere northeast. Then…….love. I found Craig and he was home so, home and here I am. I’ve done that love and I think for the right love, I’d do it again.
But the right kind of love……..the one that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things……It’s hard for me to believe that, that kind of love exists outside the realm of the Father’s love for us yet the Love Chapter asserts that it does — that as we grow into the people God would have us be, that we take on God’s nature and in-so-doing are able to love to the ends as God has and does. And so I wonder if the right kind of love isn’t too far of a stretch.
I don’t know if this is my reasoning as a child or as an adult at this point because where love is all of the things the Love Chapter asserts, it is also much more. Love is blind. Love is a many splendid thing. Love lifts us up where we belong. All we need is love. And yet aren’t those phrases for the idealist? Love is the answer. Love is the beginning and the end. Seems so simple. Simple answers are for the idealist. And yet…………and yet I always was the idealist. It has always been true that at the end of the day if love jumped off a cliff, I’d follow it and maybe to my demise (as I have a time or two), but maybe at some point love will take flight. And, actually, it has to. Love has to take flight because all other accomplishments will come to pass but if they do so without love, what really is the point?
And so here on Valentines Day 2016, when I ought to be the pessimist because all arrows (even Cupid’s) should really point to that in me, I claim the idealist. Go jump off a mountain, Love. I think you know I’ll be right behind.
