All You Need Is Love

This is a continuation from the previous blog.  So if you haven’t read it, please go back and do so.  

Objective 9.  Love
always Rejoices with the truth.

                Synonyms
for rejoice: celebrate,  express joy, to be pleased about, cheer,
exult, be glad about.

                Synonyms
for truth: fact, reality,
genuineness, exactness, legitimacy.

What the heck does it mean to rejoice with the truth?  Even with those synonyms I don’t know.  What does truth entail?  Does it mean “love doesn’t lie?”  Does it mean “love always tells the truth
even when it’s brutally honest and unnecessary?”   One of my teammates pointed out that to her, rejoicing with the truth has to do with what you choose to believe. There are constantly things being spoken over us.  Some of them are true.  Some of them are just lies from the enemy.   We can choose to rejoice in the truth, and give no heed to the lies.  

Objective 10.  Love
always protects.

 Let’s
just be honest.  I’m possibly the least
threatening person I know, though p90x has taught me a couple punches and kicks
I’m sure would work in real life.  The
truth is, if love is supposed to always protect, it’s not always going to
protect using brute force.  There’s lots
of ways people need protection.  I’m
thankful that I was protected from a lot of influences while growing up.  Protection goes far beyond physical safety,
though that’s definitely one way to show you love someone, to protect them
physically.  Emotionally protecting
people is much harder.  Not letting
feelings get out of hand, not saying things that are going to only hurt,
protecting the hearts of our brothers and sisters in Christ.  When we think of protection that way, it’s a
lot easier to see how we can fail at loving via protection.

Objective 11. Love always trusts.

                Oh
trust.  Welcome, once again, to community
living.  We’ve all grown up under the
mantra “you have to earn trust, you can’t just have it freely.”  Try breaking that off of you, and you’ll
probably hit a wall.  Coming onto the
World Race, they expect your ‘community’ to be a ‘safe place’ where you trust
the people you’re with because they’re who you’re going to be doing life
with.  Two words: Not. Easy.  You don’t know anything about these people,
and you have to trust them with your life. 
Not only your life, but your past, and trust that they will still love
you in the end.  We had to overcome a lot
of trust issues in the last 8 months, and I know we are all still working on it
to some degree or another.  But love…true
love…always trusts.  Not “love sometimes
trusts” or “love occasionally trusts” but “love always trusts.”  I guess when I begin to focus on trusting others,
it gets turned back on me.  How can I be
more trustworthy, so people don’t have to struggle to trust me?  Like I said, this one is still a work in
progress.

Objective 12. Love always perseveres.

                When I
think persevere, I think of having to continue striving after something, even
though obstacles stand in my way, and it’s not easy, but to continue striving
until it’s accomplished.  Put that way, a
love that perseveres is something special. 
It’s a love that doesn’t quit at the first sign of trouble.  It’s a love that can look at the
imperfections of people, and stand by them anyway, and sometimes even because
of those imperfections.  Persevering love
does not give up.   Obviously Jesus is the best example of
persevering love, that he would love us through everything that he faced, every
beating, every comment, every glare. 
What would it take for us to have the persevering love of Jesus? 

Objective 13. Love never fails.

                Every
time I read the 1 Corinthians 13 passage, I always pause when I get to this one.  There’s just something so powerful about
those three words.  Love.  Never. 
Fails.  I think it has to do with
the fact that things around us fail all the time.  People fail our expectations.  The internet fails to work (welcome to
anywhere outside the US).  Appliances
fail to do what we want them to do. 
Books fail, movies fail, life fails. 
We get so used to almost expecting things to fail us-to let us
down.  But love, love is different.  The true love described will never fail.  It will never fall short.  If love is our focus, we will not be let
down.  Yes, sometimes we think we know
love.  We think we love someone or
something or someplace, but often times we get let down and we ‘fall out of
love.’  I guess it only means that it
wasn’t love to begin with, because love never fails.  Application to my life?  Trust in that. People are people, but love
can go beyond people and human emotion.

Objective 14.  Love is freely given.

                “My
command is this: Love eachother as I
have loved you.”  Famous words spoken by none other than Jesus,
recorded in John 15:12.  There’s a lot
that goes into the idea of love being freely given.  We were freely given love when Jesus died on
the cross and rose again.  I certainly
never asked for that to happen.  I never
would have expected it-because what have I ever done to be deserving of such
love.  That’s the beauty in it, I
suppose. It was freely given to us.  Who
are we to withhold love from others?   
It’s the two  greatest commands:
to love God and love others.  Why do we
think we know better,and get to choose who we love and who doesn’ t deserve
it.  WE DON’T DESERVE IT.  I don’t deserve it.  But I accept it.  And it’s time for me to love as I am loved:
completely, unconditionally, freely. 
This more or less changes my outlook on how I respond to people in this
world.  God loves people.  God loves me. 
I should love people.  That’s
it.  (please refer to objectives 1-13 and
15 for further instruction).

Objective 15.  Love is Sacrifice.

              I’d
like to use another quote by that great guy, Jesus.  He says in John 15:13 “greater love has no one than this: to lay down
one’s life for one’s friends.”  I HAVE TO
DIE TO SHOW MY LOVE?! Hold up, there, Romeo and Juliet wannabe’s.  No. 
And yet yes.  Jesus displayed this
‘greater love’ in His death on the cross. 
It was sacrifice.  It was
pain.  It was gruesome.  It was love. 
But often times people will go to extremes to make you consider every
step up to that.  If we can sacrifice our
very lives in the name of love, we should be able to sacrifice little things
to.  Recent examples: sitting in a chair
at dinner instead of a stool; letting children use and lose your precious
colored pencils; monotonously painting window bars for hours while other people
paint fun colored walls.  The list goes on
and on.  This one (like every one before
it) can refer back to “love is not self seeking.”  Sacrifice becomes easy when you remember what
was sacrificed for you and how far you can take it.  Sacrifice is another objective that can
easily become a blog in and of itself, so for now I’ll be done.  Sacrifice. 
Do it.