The Complexity of Love
As I sit down to write this blog post for Valentine’s Day with the topic being love, my mind is pulled 100 different directions. First off, I think of the love I share with my husband on our 4th anniversary which is the day before Valentine’s Day. Then, I think about our son, we welcomed into the world last year and the love I feel for him. Secondly, my mind goes to Jesus and His love for us. Without that love we are nothing.
Then, in an instant, the news flashes into my mind and my heart sinks... the meaning of love is so misunderstood, misused and misconstrued in the world around us. There’s a heaviness that millions of people are seeking “love” in such wrong places. This ache that I have for them to experience the fullness and joy that true love brings, and they may never experience it. I’m not talking some fairytale, happy ending, everything is perfect story. I’m talking the real and raw love that it showed by Jesus, his life, and how that flows into our marriages and children for generations to come.
Four Meanings to one word, LOVE
Let’s look into the highest attribute in the Bible- “love” to understand its deeper meaning and complexity. My mind goes to a book I’m reading through right now called “The Four Loves” by C.S. Lewis. In this book, he breaks down love into four categories – affection, friendship, romantic, and charity. The first topic, affection (storge) covers a multitude of loves. It’s the affection we feel for the people that are always around us in the ordinary daily life, and is how we experience love on a regular basis.
Friendship (philia) is the next love and is the most time consuming. It’s a love that our modern world feels we can live without. C.S. Lewis quotes, “few value it because few experience it.” This type of love is developed over something you have in common, and grows in that sharing to a deeper care for one another.
The next topic- romantic (eros), is a deep love that is shared between a husband and wife. The Bible paints this type of love in a beautiful picture from the very beginning in Genesis one to show the love God has for His bride, the church. It’s unconditional, unwavering, and beautiful. It’s chooses to see past all the flaws, imperfections and differences and love one another still.
Lastly is charity (agape), the most important and our center focus for love. Every human that enters this world is created to love and be loved, it’s just how God designed us. But with love comes sorrow, pain, and suffering. Just look at Jesus, dying on the cross as the perfect example. An overview of his book online states this perfectly;
“Though the fall has invited, such selfishness to linger heavy in our culture, ours is the gospel charge – to go to the ninth degree to love, those who are broken, not for some vague, humanitarian effort, but to make disciples of all nations, ‘Baptizing them, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.’ (Matthew 28:19-20) Let us ask God to awaken such an abandoned and reckless love to come alive in us.”
How does this help with the heaviness we feel in our hearts for the world?
As I read through this article overview of Lewis’s book that I am still reading through, it gave me clarity, peace, hope, and passion to the heaviness I felt earlier. Clarity on the meaning of love and how we are called to love one another. Peace that in a world that is crumbling around us, we have a hope in Jesus Christ who paid the price for our sins and is seated at the right hand of the Father. Waiting for us in Heaven. Passion, to share this message of love to a hurting and broken world, and it ALL starts in my own home.
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 says, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
This challenged me, and gave me purpose as a stay at home mom, working to raise up my son knowing and understanding this love. To raise up the next generation to continue on in the war against all odds to love unconditionally and share the hope of Jesus Christ, and I hope it challenges you too in whatever role you are called to serve right now.
Our Souls One True Love, Jesus
The Lord is calling me to not get caught up in all of the sadness and strife going on around us, but let me focus my gaze on the Heavenly Father to learn how to love. Let me draw all the more closer to my first one and true love – Jesus Christ, and then, from that place of love pour into my marriage and family, which will pour out into our world. Let me take the love I have, and go into the lowest places, seeking to share this love with a broken, lost and hurting world.
Let me be the hands and feet of love sharing this good news, gospel to every tribe and tongue. Let me love without holding anything back. Love in the little and big ways. Take a neighbor a baked good, make a family in need a meal, sponsor a child who can’t afford school in another country, or buy the person behind you a coffee, and the list goes on and on.
I felt the Lord saying be faithful in the little, and God will turn it into much.
Lights, Camera, ACTION!
So, this Valentines Day I encourage you to not get caught up in all of the glitz and glam this holiday brings with pinks and reds and conversation hearts promoting surface level love, but feel the call to take this message of Christ’s love and share it with everyone you can. It’s a message worth sharing to every soul and person we meet and it starts with YOU.
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.” - 1 Corinthians 13:4-8
This is a helpful discussion guide for The Four Love’s Book from CSLewis.com
Learn more about sponsoring a student for school in Haiti here.
This post was written by Alyssa Benderoth, who along with her husband Andrew, is the vice-president of Espwa Demen Mission. You can read their bio here.