We hear it everywhere – all you need is love.
Many songs have captured this sentiment. We’re all looking for it in some capacity and have a deep sense we were made for it. But what is it and how do you “get it”?
What love is has been misconstrued in so many ways. Psychology has discovered so much about the effect an absence of love has on childhood development. We all were parented to some degree into various distortions of what love is. For some of us love was heavily connected to pleasing certain members of our families and trying to keep them happy (or keep them from becoming unhappy with us…). If we failed to do so, love was withdrawn or withheld in some form.
For others, love was illusive and intimacy was not a felt reality. In some cases it wasn’t an outright abusive situation just a vague sense that love was either absence or unnecessary.
Still others experienced love as being attached to high performance in sports, talents, academics, spirituality or other achievements. Unfortunately there are also familial situations where broken parents break the hearts of their children through forms of abuse and abandonment.
Even the best of parents could not offer a flawless example of what love really is!
For creatures created to live from a the foundation of connection with empowering and pure love, the felt absence of it is devastating to our psyche and well being. Because of this, humanity has been vulnerable to a highly destructive lie.
This is the lie that we are without love or at least partially incomplete in love and therefore we must go find it. A very popular verse speaks to this notion combating it with a surprising truth.
In John 3:16 we read,
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
You see we have always been loved.
In fact, we have always been loved perfectly ...
A perfect love is unconditional which is not something we are very acquainted with in our life with other humans.
But there is Love that has loved us forever. Love comes to us in the embodiment of a Being. The bible book of 1 John tells us “love comes from God” (4:7) and even more pointedly “God is love” (4:8). Wherever we see real love operating in the earth and in our own hearts we see God.
We can learn what love is by experiencing who love is …
A beautiful description of love is found in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. Since God is love we can read it as a description of who He is. I’m going to finish this post with the words of this bible chapter substituting the word “love” with “God”. As you read pay attention to any particular aspects that you especially connect with today. “God loves you and me” is a truth with endless capability to heal, restore and direct our lives to all we were meant to be. Let’s soak in the truth today that we are and have always been immensely loved.
God is large and incredibly patient.
God is gentle and consistently kind to all. He refuses to be jealous when blessing comes to someone else.
God does not brag about one’s achievements nor inflate its own importance.
God does not traffic in shame and disrespect, nor selfishly seek his own honour.
God is not easily irritated or quick to take offence.
God joyfully celebrates honesty and finds no delight in what is wrong.
God is a safe place of shelter, for He never stops believing the best for others
God never takes failure as defeat, for he never gives up.
God never stops loving.
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