The second-most complicated concept I have ever tried to understand, and one that still baffles me, is love. Something tells me that understanding love is going to be a lifetime process, and even then, one that I’m never quite going to bring to a satisfactory conclusion.
So obviously my purpose in writing today isn’t to present a neatly packaged bundle of insights that definitively pronounce what love is. Rather it’s to throw a handful of partially cooked spaghetti up against the wall and see if any of it sticks. Even for a moment.
Every time I think I have some clue what love is and how it works, life (or God in most cases) throws me a curve ball and I have to tear it all apart and begin building my understanding of it again. Every time I put it together in my head, I think I’m getting a little closer to understanding, but I never seem to be able to get all the pieces put together into a coherent whole. There are always bits that stick out of the side, parts that are the wrong color, gaps in the structure, and pieces that just don’t fit together at all no matter how I turn them around.
Part of the problem, I know, is that to fully understand love is to fully understand God. Love is the only concept which scripture declares is equivalent to God. Yes, of course, the Bible says that God is my shield, my deliverer, and so on, but those are simply descriptions of some of the aspects of God. When scripture says that God is love, they are on equal footing—one is the same as the other; they are interchangeable. So for me to comprehend love in all its depth and sophistication would mean that I have a grasp on God, or to think of it the other way around, the day I finally understand God completely is the day I will figure out love.
But this is also what makes love worth figuring out despite its complexity and depth and impossibility. Everything I learn about love takes me one step closer to understanding God. Love is also something you can’t learn about intellectually; you only learn about it by living it, by experiencing it, and sometimes by messing it up completely. Experiencing it is a huge risk, though, because when you get it wrong, it hurts. But we don’t have the option of skipping that part of life:
But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love. (1 John 4:8, NLT)
The Greeks had four different words that we translate into English as “love.” But somehow I think that even if we had a hundred words (like the myth about how many Inuit words there are for snow) it wouldn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what love really means. None of what I’m going to write here is really new—C. S. Lewis expressed it far better than I ever will—but as I always do I’m going to relate it to my life and my experiences because that’s how I figure things out. I’m going to spend some time over the next few days and weeks (and probably months and years) thinking about this, trying to distill my thoughts into something approaching a coherent idea, and writing about it. Hopefully some of the spaghetti will stick.
Oh, yeah, and if you’re curious, the most complicated thing I’ve ever tried to understand (at least this far in my life) is quantum physics, just slightly edging out love for the top spot. I have this feeling, though, that eventually I’ll figure out the physics.
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