What is Love?

What is Love?

Love will never betray you, dismay, or enslave you; it will set you free. Be more like the man, you were meant to be. – Mumford and Sons.

Love is good. It can only be good, because out of love comes goodness. Love cannot be evil, since out of evil, one finds only hate. Therefore love is good and since it is only good, it can only be beautiful. All beautiful things are created with love, from which comes the care, attention and passion necessary to create that beauty. The creation becomes beautiful because reflected within it is a part of the creator. Without a loving creator, the creation cannot be beautiful. It would be empty and ugly.

Love is passionate, it is hot, fiery, and energetic. It cannot be cold. Have you ever heard of a cold lover? Cold is a term used to describe emotionless and distant people, on the other hand, loving people tend to have a warmth around them, a warmth that emanates from the hot fire within their heart. That of love. It is a fire that burns, engulfs and consumes all in its wake.

Yet, Love’s consummation is special, it doesn’t reduce or destroy or break down the substance it consumes. Rather, it increases and grows and changes it! Love creates, it cannot destroy, since it is good.

Love is selfless. All its actions are for the benefit of another and it always puts others ahead of itself. Love fully gives of itself for another too. Love is humble, out of its selflessness, it chooses to serve others rather than be served. Love is charitable. It seeks to share all that it has. It will never take from you, because it cannot take. Love is a gift.

Love is freedom, because love is selfless. It can never be forced on any one or force anyone. Love is a choice, a conscious decision, a commitment, and a conviction.

Love is merciful and forgiving. It never turns away those who seek it, no matter how many times they turn away or how far away they go. Yet, Love is just, requiring fairness and reparation of wrongdoing, it teaches harsh lessons so that one might grow and grow in love. Love seeks the truth, so that justice may be done, for in lies and falsehoods, there can be no reality, they are empty. Love is the truth, it is full and it is real.

Love is supernatural. It transcend beyond our world. It cannot be seen directly, or quantified or explained by Science. To Science, who cannot understand or explain why or how Love exists, it merely reduces it to chemicals in our heads that alter the way we act in our lives. Though, perhaps, it is because of the perfection creation of love that we have these chemicals in our heads. That is, we are made to love; hence, love brings about the biochemical changes. And like all of the supernatural, love casts a shadow on this world, seen through these chemicals, but more importantly, the many acts of love that we perform.

Love is a blinding light, so hot and so bright, that it blinds one to the superficial visage of the worldly skin that clothes us in shallow and materialistic aesthetics that turn people into objects and commodities. Rather, Love’s light is so bright, that it illuminates the soul and spirit within. It lets us look past the dirt of the fallen world, to see the innate beauty and intrinsic dignity hidden within us, and lets us see who we really are, who we were meant to be.

Love is suffering. It is not a transient affection feeling of appeal, not the desire or quantity of how much one is willing to do or give to another. No, Love is the willingness to suffer for another. Love is denying ourselves and our wants and needs for another’s.

Love is a sacrifice. Perfect love is to give up everything to suffer for another person’s life. To be lay down one’s own life for another. It is to be completely innocent and pure and choosing to bear the punishment and shame and humiliation of another’s crimes, so that he will have a second chance to live. So that he will have a second chance to love. It is being tied to a pillar to be beaten and spat on, and then to be scourged. It is to be flagellated with hooked whip designed to tear and rip out flesh on every strike. To have one’s title and office mocked and insulted, by a crown of thorns forced on one’s head, digging into one’s temples, one’s skull. It is to be drag the heavy instrument of one’s death to the execution place, and then to be nailed and hung on it. It is to die, suffocating on one’s own collapsed muscles.

It is to give up a royal throne of power and majesty to be born in a stable, and to sleep in a manger, in complete poverty to be in solidarity with the lowest pauper. Amidst beasts and livestock, sleeping peacefully on a bed of hay. Love is the child whose birthday you recently celebrated. The babe, the creator of the cosmos, the very Saviour of the World. That is love.

Love is God, and He is called Jesus the Christ, and from Him, comes all love.