Love

Love is difficult. It’s elusive. I am convinced I’d die for it, but I can’t really define it. It has to be the most misappropriated word in our language, if not any language. The Greeks split the definitions for love into four, like the Eskimos having twenty words for snow. So, depending on the circumstance, then it’s one kind of love or another. Really, there are kinds?

There is all sorts of talk in the Bible about God’s love, and his desire for us to love him, to love ourselves, and to love our neighbour. ‘Love one another as I have loved you’, he says.

I am thinking about this coming weekend and Easter. It’s the high point on the calendar for Christians. It’s three days full of betrayal, denial, violence, fear, death, and resurrection. This is love?

Actually, I can identify more with that than I can the love of Valentine’s Day cards. In my experience love is messy and uneven. It’s counterintuitive. What I have come to understand is that love has very little to do with how I feel. I am sure many who have loved me haven’t felt like it.

I know I have an unlimited capacity to love. It’s really my choice whether or not I exercise it. All I have to do is put myself aside. It’s that easy, and it’s that difficult. I would sacrifice everything for Lisa and my boys. Yet, I also know I have never been more selfish than with Lisa and the boys. There are times I have wanted out of relationships simply because they were too damn hard – too hard to love, and too hard to be loved.

Hurt, pain, and suffering alongside desire, longing, and sacrifice. Love is what it means to be fully alive - to myself and to others.

‘Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah’. – Leonard Cohen

Amen, and amen.