Love is...(part 3)

"Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love." - Albus Dumbledore

The conclusion of my "Love is" series is that "Love is...a Battlefield." Love isn't something that we're naturally prone to do. We don't wake up one day with this amazing ability to love someone, just because it was cultivated in us by our parents or our environment or even in our nature (if you wanna go the nature vs. nurture route). Often times, we don't like loving people. It's not easy, it's not convenient, it's not anything that we desire to do...wanna know why? (You should know this by now...) It's because we don't get anything from it. Not immediately, anyway. Loving someone isn't about what you get from them, what they can do for you. Loving someone is about showing them the same type of love God showed you no matter what(which we talked about last week), and showing it to them consciously, as much as possible (which we talked about the first week).

I made it a point to talk about the difficulty of love because people have this weird sense of the word "love." They think it's all flowers and sausages (a favorite saying here at SMM). They think it's all chocolate and romantic evenings, all butterflies and fun times and trips and hand-holding and romantic moments. Or they use it as a way to get what they want. Or maybe they use it as means to prove something to someone else. (I'm guilty of all of the above.)

The battlefield analogy of love...it's a tough one. It's tough to think about, especially since we're in the midst of a war, and people have loved-ones fighting overseas. It seems silly to convolute love with metaphors, when Jesus outlines it so elegantly by the way He lived daily. My analogy is this: to me, it seems like when you truly love someone, namely an enemy, you sidestep one mine just to walk over another. You get hurt even when you try to do or say the right thing. The battle analogy is just to show that a lot of the time, when you try to really love someone the way God would want you to, you're going to face opposition. Satan doesn't like when God's people do what God wants them to do. (1 Pet. 5:8)

So in short, love people the way God would have you to love them. It's not going to be easy. It's going to be really really difficult. But yknow what? Dumbledore was right. People who don't know Love, the real Love, the Author of Love, are to be pitied - but don't leave them in their pity. God didn't leave you when you needed love most, did He? No way! But He did love people the way they were...just too much to leave them that way. When you view love the way God does, the gushy stuff the world offers doesn't stand a chance. Live in love. It may not be easy, but it's the most joyous thing you can experience.