I’ve been pondering this subject of love for a while—and not really getting very far. I think I’m trying to over-complicate it. I keep reading 1 Corinthians 13 and thinking, “It can’t possibly be that simple. There has to be more, there has to be something I’m missing.” I think it’s my tenth grade English teacher’s fault.
Tag Archives: Love
Tenth Grade English
Don’t Ever Pray For It!
Patience. The first quality that Paul lists for love. He had to start with the hard one.
We have a running joke in our small group: don’t ever pray for patience! I remember talking to a member of the group who had a fairly young relationship with God. During the prayer time at the end of the Bible study, she prayed that God would give her patience about a situation, and afterwards we teased her about it. “Don’t pray for that,” we told her, “because that’s one thing that’s never a gift. God always answers that prayer the hard way.”
Love is…something
I wish Charles Schultz were still alive, because I think he’d be able to help me in my search to identify what love really is. He had the ability to capture a feeling in just a few words when he wrote “Happiness is a warm puppy.” Enough said. In that brief sentence, he evokes inside us exactly what happiness really is.
I don’t have the eloquence or the insight of Charles Schultz, so I’m going to have to go about this a different way. I need to take Paul’s approach instead. Paul breaks down for us in great detail what love is, what it’s components and attributes are from different perspectives. He tears apart the concept and rebuilds is for us bit by bit until the sculpture is complete.
But my brain can’t quite wrap itself around it all at once, and I need to go a step further. I’m going to take each point he makes one at a time and try to rip into it, make some sense of it, connect it to my reality and my world, and figure out where my perceptions and mistakes fit into God’s idea of what love is.
Something About Love
So I said I was going to work on figuring out how to explain love, and now, two and a half weeks later, you can see how far I’ve gotten.
I think part of my problem is that I want love to be neat, simple, and consistent. I want it to be something reliable and constant in my life—like God is supposed to be—and yet all I’m finding is this incredible roller coaster. There are so many complicated aspects to love, and so many parts to each of the aspects, and shades of understanding for each of the parts, that it becomes a mess just trying to keep track of it all.
It’s not worth it.
The Second-Most Complicated Concept
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.
