Sun Mar 08 2009 7:26am PDT
Mood: thoughtful
Music: NA
Aden um to The Secret Revealed
What is Love? It\'s a question many struggle with. The bible clearly defines love in I Corinthians 13:4. Based on the biblical definition (and that SHOULD be our definition too) I wrote about what love is as it was revealed to me through this verse in The Secret Revealed.
Unfortunately why people can\'t pin down what love is even after knowing what God says it is seems to be simply the mess that is the english language. In english, the word love takes on many different meanings depending on context. I don\'t love my brother the same way I love my girlfriend. And the word again has different meaning when I say \"I\'m in love\". Or the word has an alternate action meaning when we make love. It would be nice to have different words for those different meanings but since we don\'t, we should take time to tease out the differences among them.
God says we are to love Him with all our being and to love others as I love myself. How do we do that? I Cor 13:4 tells us how and what it looks like. This applies to our friend, stranger, and romantic relationships. This is the love that we DO. Anything we DO has a choice behind it to do it or not. That is the choice that people face relating to love. English is so non-specific that the choice of it gets lost in the noise.
The other components of what we call love in english are not what God says love is. They should rightly have different names to describe them but we don\'t so we have to be able to navigate contexts. Those english contexts not defined by God are being \"in love\" and \"making love\".
When I say I\'m in love, I am referring to that feeling, those emotions, that butterflies in the stomach, I want to be around her all the time feeling. An emotion. This is definitely something that we have little control over. How it happens we don\'t really know. Something with pheromones and attraction and preconceived desires. Some people fall in and out of love. And for those of us that know, that spark of true love never really goes away. But is that love? I will say no. Because that isn\'t how God defined it so clearly. It\'s something else. You can have both God\'s love and emotional love for someone (which is good! good strong romantic relationships have both God\'s love and emotional love) or purely emotional love for someone (which is bad, it blinds you and makes you do stupid things you wouldn\'t normally do). *this paragraph may need rewording to better clarify what i mean*
The last love that english has is sex. In english we make love. Is that how God defined love? No. It\'s fluffy to say it that way instead of \"we fucked\" or some such. But this is not love.
English is a mess in love haha!