Real Love

I hope everyone had a great Valentine's day yesterday with their loved one. Never sure why we have to set aside just one day a year to be extra romantic, but I guess if some didn't there would never be any romance in their life. Leslie and I had a good Valentines, we ate at the Olive Garden for lunch and gave each other some small gifts, nothing really spectacular, but it was nice.

It's great to share love with someone else, and I don't just mean your spouse or your girlfriend/boyfriend, I'm also talking about friendships and families as well as the love that exists between us and God. Love has been made into such a diverse word, from "I love you" to "I love these chips" to whatever else. Love can be such a strong word in some situations and in others can be just as cliched as any other word. Why are so many things attached to this one word? Why has it been made out to mean so many different things when there really is only one definition of it.

As a Christian love must be the center of all that we are and do. God is love, as the scripture says, so to know God is to know love. To be like God is to be a loving person. Without love we do everything in vain. The world has made love out to be a self fulfilling thing, I love this person because they make me feel so great, and they can do all these things for me. It teaches us that we should only love those that can give us what we want. Love is all about what I can get out of it, not so much as to what we can put into it. Worldly love, Soap Opera love, is the exact opposite of the love God intends for us to have. The right kind of love is about sacrifice, what are you willing to do for someone else? What are you willing to give to God or give up for God? We must get rid of this self-righteous train of thought. "If it isn't what I want, I don't want it at all." "I deserve only the best."

The way we act and the things that we say, in my opinion, say a lot about our love for God, ourselves, and for others. Is it love coming out of your mouth when you're a jerk to someone, or when you gossip about or slander other people? I think you know the answer. Is it love when we accept someone who is different than us, and that no one else will except, or when we put our wants to the side to help someone else get what they need. My friends, that is only a glimpse of the love of God, if I were even able to describe it, I would never have enough cyberspace to type it all out, but I like to use the word sacrifice to describe love, although there are other words as well. When I think about true love, I sometimes think about the love that exists between husband and wife, etc., but my mind always goes back to the greatest love ever shown to us, when God willingly gave his only son so that we might be able to communicate with him and one day be with him in heaven, and how his son willlingly chose to accept his Father's will and mercifully carry the sins of the entire world from every generation past present and future on his beaten and battered shoulders so that even the ones who beat him and hung him on a cross may have the opportunity to know true love and taste salvation. That is love, explainable or not, that is love. It's the right kind of love, it's the good kind of love, and it is the perfect kind of love.

May the love that God pours out on us, overflow so that it spills over into the lives of those we encounter that they might taste the love and salvation that he brings us.