The Art of Love

What is love? Is it a feeling? Action? Choice? I’d say all of the above. Love is such an overused word these days. The overapplication has left it devoid of meaning. It’s like in Anchorman when Brick declares “I love lamp.” Love has become a junk drawer term to say we really like something (which isn’t even always the case).

Part of the reason for this is the often inadequacy of the English language. While it only has one word for love, many other languages will have multiple to convey different types of love. For example:

Tamil, the main language in Sri Lanka has five words: Anpu, Katl, Achai, Pachm, and Kaikkilai. Arabic has four: Habb, ‘Ishq, Shaghaf, and Hanaan. And the Irish language has four as well: Grá, Cion, Searc, and Cumann. Each of these languages give us options to express different types of love. 

Selfish Love

When asked what we love about someone the answer usually has something to do with how they make us feel or what they do for us. Answers like these are more about us than the other person, which is really just centering ourselves. Our love for others tends to be about us and not them, making us the object of our love and not them. 

This is selfish love. It also explains why we can seemingly so easily fall out of love. Love in our brains is determined by a person’s usefulness. As long as they can provide the feelings we long for, then we can continue to love them. It is when this arrangement is upset, we find ourselves slipping away.

True Love

Jesus gives us a better example of what true love is. Love that is not predicated on what others can do for you. He shows us what it means to sacrifice. Specifically for those who have nothing to offer in return. There is nothing we could have given him or done for him to earn his love. Think about it, this is the second person of the Trinity we’re talking about. Do you think your ability with spreadsheets or a camera is enough to add value to him?

We live in a world that teaches us to discard those who are deemed to have lesser value. A common social media tagline is “if you don’t add value to my life then you don’t need to be in it.” What kind of mess is that? What kind of disregard for humanity are we fostering with that mindset? Jesus points us in the completely opposite direction.

He loves us with a “just because” love. Ephesians 2:4-9 is a great reference on this:  But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,  so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

It’s not anything we’ve done, it’s simply because of who He is. Jesus does not look for the best and the brightest. He has no concern for who is the strongest. Jesus loves all of those people and the ones on the margins. He loves those the world loves and the ones it would not love. It is just because. Our good qualities do not make us any more worthy than our bad qualities make us any less worthy. That should put a smile on your face. 

Now what if we loved like that? What if we didn’t limit love to the realms of romance and familial? What if our love looked like caring for the vulnerable? Over and over Scripture admonishes us to care for the sojourner, widow, and the orphan. To open our doors to them, learn about them, care for them. Those are acts of love. We don’t think of the sojourner, widow, and orphan today but really it means the most vulnerable in society. Today that can mean those experiencing homelessness, the mentally ill, people in bigger bodies, the childless and parentless, anybody who struggles in this world. 

This is our chance to display “just because” love. We love people who can contribute to us, people we like, and those who are similar to ourselves. But what about those who are not our preference, can we love them anyway?

Think about how you treat your friends. Do you love them well? That’s a good place to start. If you can’t love those close to you, it will be impossible to genuinely love those who are far. Love truly is all of those previously mentioned things: feeling, choice, and action. Jesus perfectly displayed all three and now we can reflect that to the world.