Love Is...

 

Thursday, September 14, 2023

This is the message you have heard from the beginning:  We should love one another.  We must not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and killed his brother.  And why did he kill him?  Because Cain had been doing what was evil, and his brother had been doing what was righteous.  So don’t be surprised, dear brothers and sisters, if the world hates you.  If we love our brothers and sisters who are believers, it proves that we have passed from death to life.  But a person who has no love is still dead.  Anyone who hates another brother or sister is really a murderer at heart.  And you know that murderers don’t have eternal life within them.  We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us.  So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters.      1 John 3:11-16

I’ve never been able to get comfortable with what Ryan O’Neal said to Ali MacGraw in the 1970 movie Love Story.  The iconic sentence was:  Love means never having to say you’re sorry.  What was wrong with the line is it helps hallmark the concept of love as entirely belonging to romance.  Tear-jerking aside, anyone who has ever fallen in love knows that tear-jerking, heart-wrenching, soul-claiming romance cannot last without a big bunch of “I’m sorries”. 

Five decades later I’ve become somewhat resigned to the notion.  There is an aspect of love that can’t be separated from romance, but it falls far short of God’s kind of love.

Apostle John defined the word “love” for us with the concept of self-sacrificial living.  In short, we cannot begin to say we love unless we are holding the life of another dearer than our own.  It is willingness to give ourselves up that another might live which distinguishes sacrifice from selfishness.  It is the essence of love to give the most extravagant gift we possess.

I first began to get an inkling of that concept when I was a child.  There was something of an uncomfortableness about how my Mom always took the smallest piece of pie, and let her two boys have the larger pieces (three boys, if you include my Dad).  After all, Mom had done the cutting, and there was always one piece remarkably smaller than all the others.  I guess this is where my settling-down on never having to say you’re sorry comes-in; Mom would never have to apologize for giving her boys what they loved…a bigger slice of apple pie.  I’m reasonably certain neither my brother, nor I, fully-understood that when we sat at Mom and Dad’s table all those years ago.  But we ate (and still remember) that bigger slice of pie to this day.

For You Today 

Whether it costs you a piece of pie, or the last breath of your only life, putting the other person first is what God would do; He settled that long ago when he took our sins to a cross on Golgotha, Jerusalem’s garbage dump.  He offered you the whole pie of forgiveness.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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