Mature Love
It’s time to grow up.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
1 Corinthians 13:11 (ESV)
Pop Love is adolescent dreaming about relationships and what love will one day be like when we are older. This is normal and a healthy part of development . . . IF (A big IF here) . . . if it is found in the developing child.
For everyone else who is thinking in the Pop Love way it is either a sign of emptiness or is being used to manipulate people, especially those not yet mature. It is more lust than love.
Real authentic True Love is the best part of the human soul and is most connected to the holiness and goodness of God and to others. It is not based on their performance, but on a mysterious attractive force I have been trying to understand and describe over the past many entries.
This is the love that connects so well with God it is considered the fulfillment of the law.
But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Matthew 22:34-40 (ESV)
God’s True Love pursues, but never grasps or clings, because it always wants the absolute best for the one being pursued. So True Love restrains itself and behaves in such a way as to cause the one being pursued to stop running, turn and actually wholeheartedly embrace Love back. This is actually a beautiful description of repentance and it also describes how a lot of emotional healing happens. It is stopping and turning away from our destructive selfishness because our heart is calling us back to the One who loved us the most sincerely all along.
When this transaction with True Love occurs, a bond of protection forms and the Beloved receives an affirmation of True Love’s power and commitment. It’s called Life. True Love creates, sustains, and multiplies life.
And here’s the best part.
Love never ends.
For the believer in God’s Love, the fairytale ending comes true. We do indeed live happily ever after. This is the point so many writers, like C. S. Lewis, have made that all good fiction rings true because it is found in a deeper reality, another world, that is truer than this one that seems so final.
After the read; scrolling down to the final photo knocked my socks off.
It was a good week of posts on love.
Thank you.