Love. Such a small word with such a large impact. Love can bring heartache, despair, desperation, joy, exuberantion, exhilaration, passion, saddness, and forgiveness. Love can reside in every emotion.
Love, however, is one of the hardest things to understand. Why does one fall in and out of love? We have often associated love with the gooey feeling of butterflies and chills sent by a touch. We live in a world where fictional love stories dictate our definition. But is this definition really love?
I have often been told that I am too logical and rational about love and I don't let myself "feel" the emotion of it...but the more I study scripture the more I realize love is a verb, and action, a choice. You don't always feel like loving someone...case in point "love your enemy " do you feel gooey about loving your enemy? No, that is a choice you have to make. Or "love keeps no records of wrong doings" is that a gooey feeling? It seems that the modern definition of love is flawed.
As a single women, one who would love to meet my prince charming and have him sweep me off my feet and live happily ever after, I have come to realize how much damage this mindset of Prince charming or princess can be. Love must last past the gooey stage. Love must endure two imperfect people merging, a sometimes painful experience as you learn to die to self and focus on the well being of someone else. Love is selfless and sometimes frustrating. Love is communication, even if you don'the feel like communicating. Love is doing what is best for that person, supporting them, encouraging them, building them up, leading them closer to Christ daily, growing with them despite that habit you hate. And love is standing by their side when everyone else walks away. Love, my friends, is a choice we make daily.
I often wonder if divorce rates are so high because we choose our mates from "gooey" love. I think about in the moment the vows are being read "for better or worse, rich or poor, sickness and in health" what does that look like for "gooey" love. Would divorce rates decrease if we looked at love differently? I read an article about marriage the other day that said people don't commit in relationships anymore because we hold people to a "no baggage" standard that we, ourselves, cannot live up to. We drown our desire for love in selfishness and then wonder why we are alone and dissatisfied with every partner we have. I believe, the beginning of changing this, starts with redefining love. Recognizing it for what God designed it to be, putting the Hollywood and Disney Princess charming and Princess dreams behind us and loving like Christ loves. Like God loves.
I try to understand love, I often fail, but one exercise I do is to take 1 Corinthians 7...the love verses...and pose each one as a question using my name.... am I kind? Am I patient? Do I keep no records of wrong? And hope that when I am standing at the alter with the man I love I will be able to choose to love him when it's easy, when it's hard, rather I feel the "gooey" or not.
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