40 Days of Love, Day 1
"Let LOVE be your Highest Goal!"
1 Corinthians 14:1
To love at all is to be venerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin or your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable...The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers...of love is Hell. (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1960, p.169.)
Are these different definitions of Love or
The same definition viewed from a different perspective? Why?
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 1 John 4:10
In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, 1 John 5:3
And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love. 2 John 1:6
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“To love at all is to be venerable” — “accorded respect and reverence because of age…wisdom.” Why? Are only the old and the wise capable of love? Is it so difficult to love that those who can are to be revered and held in high esteem with great respect and reverence? Why? I thought love and loving comes easily to human beings. The young seem to have it down pat. Or do they? The divorce rate and the existence of single-parent homes suggest otherwise, don’t they? Perhaps, love and loving do deserve the utmost “respect and reverence” as do those who, “for better or worse,” choose to love as well as choose to be loved and accept that love in return.
For it is a choice, you know. Love and loving is a choice. It is a choice not easy, by any means, to make; and a choice, when made, not to be taken lightly. Perhaps the sentence, “To love at all is to be venerable” would better and more appropriately written and read, “To love at all is to be vulnerable”; for with the latter wording, a conscious choice to open oneself to all that is inherent in love and loving is implied: the good times, the bad times; the smiles, the tears; the celebrations, the sorrows; the healing, the pain; the trust, the betrayal; the growth, the destruction; the learning, the forgetting. To love and be loved, to love and be loving with all the vulnerability required, makes it seem that the mantra governing a person’s choice of and for love would have to be, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
In the book entitled “The Relationship Principles of Jesus,” the author Tom Holladay relates the story of Neal and Robin. Soon after they were married and with their lives of a fairytale-love ahead of them, Robin suffered a brain hemorrhage for which the only treatment was a high-risk surgery. She survived but was paralyzed and unable to speak. Having chosen love and loving, “Neal [became] a shining example of overcoming love, and Robin, a powerful example of overwhelming courage and faith.” Holladay continues, “Neal [chose] to practice sacrificial love in a marriage that wasn’t close to what he and Robin had dreamed it would be, and Robin [chose] to accept and return Neal’s love rather than allowing her own hurt to push him away.” As I am sure you are, I am blessed to know such people and to look to them as examples of choice and vulnerability being more important in their lives than isolation and a fear of “taking a leap of faith.” For me, their names are Marilyn and Curt and Craig and Rose.
For love and loving is a “leap of faith,” you know. For us a humans, sure; but what about God? Does He take a “leap of faith” each time He reaches out to love and be loving to us? Is love and loving painless for Him? Does the statement “To love at all is to be venerable” apply to Him? Should He be “accorded respect and reverence” for loving us? For choosing to love us? Does His omnipotence cause Him not to be vulnerable when He opens His heart and chooses to love us whom “He created in His own image”? Do we make Him cry? Do we betray Him? Do we break His heart? What about Adam and Eve? What about Cain and Abel? What about you and me? Yet He still continues to love. He still continues being loving. He still continues personifying the quote, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
And what does He ask of us? That we take “a leap of faith”; that we willingly become vulnerable; and that we, therefore, choose to forever walk the two-way path of love and loving by “…loving the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all our souls and with all our minds and with all our strength…and that we love our neighbors as ourselves.”
My pastor recently posed the question, “What do you think our world would be like if Adam and Eve had not taken a bite of the apple?” After some discussion about the mercy and forgiveness that we would not know and the growth we would not experience because of Adam and Eve’s sin, he suggested that many scholars have hypothesized that such a world, not predicated on sin, would have negated the need for mercy and forgiveness and would have offered love and loving, beyond human words and imagination, to each and all from a God, Who, in and of Himself, is love personified.
“‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.”