Lessons of Love: The Reality of Love Giving

From the pen of Hannah Sorterup:


Love; what is it really? This four letter word is everywhere: written into song lyrics, screamed at us through advertisements, plastered on billboards, and emblazoned on t-shirts. But what does this word really mean?

Often the word "love" or the phrase "I love you" is used as a bargaining chip, rather than as a sign of affection and devotion as it was intended. A girl says "I love you" to her boyfriend in hopes of hearing it in return, a husband as an apology for wrongdoing, a child as a plea to get what he wants. Or it's used as an exchange for something else: "If I tell her that I love her, maybe she won't leave", "If he knows I love him, maybe he'll quit", if, if, if.

But what about those who have nothing to give in exchange for the love they crave? What about those the world has cast out and shut down: the pregnant teenager, the broken drug addict, the lonely divorcee, the friendless alcoholic, the abandoned homeless man? These people are perhaps the ones who need our love the most but are also the ones who are least likely to receive it, even from those who claim to be "Christians". Because of poor choices, these people have nothing to give in exchange in order to "buy" love.

I once heard a quote that went like this "I am neither a buyer nor a seller of love. If it is bought or sold it is not love." I could not agree with this more. Jesus Christ gave the greatest gift of love possible: the sacrifice of His own life for people who hated him and had absolutely nothing to give Him in return. As Christians or "little Christs" that is the example we are given of how to love others. We are to pull out all the stops in order to love others sacrificially and with reckless abandon even if they have absolutely nothing to give in return.

One last thought...
In his book "Boy Meets Girl", Joshua Harris compares the "love" our world gives with the love that Jesus Christ gave in this way "The world takes us to a silver screen on which flickering images of passion and romance play, and, as we watch, the world says, ‘This is love.’ God takes us to the foot of a tree on which a naked and bloodied man hangs and says ‘This is love.’"