What Love Is

In our limitations as humans, love has had varied meanings or holds diverse definitions for different people and as such, what a loved one may offer us as love may not quite feel like what we know as love. But how could this greatest gift and luxury ever given to man hold as diverse meanings to him as we see today.

Love is love and has neither degrees nor shades. If it’s not love, then it’s not love. It is believed that God is love and since he created man in his own image and likeness, man therefore is, essentially love. He desires to be loved and cannot function properly without love. Even those that don’t believe in it do so out of fear of a previous experience or one that is witnessed

In our quest to get the purest of the essence of love and make it different from that which we already know, we fashion out those soothing words we often hear such as “unconditional love”, “perfect love”, “true love”, “real love”. All, in an attempt to define that special feeling that we yearn and always search desperately for!

We are however, our own obstacles to understanding love because any time we think about love, what first comes to mind is how that man is going to take care of me or how that girl is going to submit to me in bed. In all the fancy names we call love, our thoughts are always in the direction of what to get out of a relationship, and conveniently forget that love contends the soul and makes it ready to give instead of seeking to be given. To be in love is to place ones personal needs and wants after that of the beloved one without complaining and without expecting any remunerations and to be fully involved in the fulfillment of the self interest of the loved one.

The best person to write a manual for a gadget is the maker of such a gadget and since God is love, we should look up to Him for the meaning of love. Until we look up to our maker for a clear understanding of what love is, we will desperately continue to seek that which we vaguely understand from each individuals experience.

Love your neighbour even as Christ loved his church. He died for his church. Has this any place in your definition of love?

In the long and winding journey of life, when infatuation, beauty, sex, wealth and other such details that influence our definitions of love slowly vapourize and it dawns on us that we do not have that commitment and understanding that only love can give in a relationship, we withdraw into our shells and lick our wounds of heartbreaks and then, try to convince ourselves that we don’t believe in love. It is only in love and after love has grown in our hearts that we see and experience physical attraction, desire for marriage partners and friendship that can boast of commitment and understanding.

And God did say what love is and it goes thus

If i speak with the languages of men and of angels, but don’t have love, i have become a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.

If i have the gift of prophesy and know all the mysteries and knowledge; and if i have faith, so as to move mountains but don’t have love, i am nothing.

If i dole out all my goods to feed the poor and if i give my body to be burned but don’t have love, it profits me nothing

Love is kind and is patient

Love doesn’t envy

Love doesn’t brag

Love is not proud

Love doesn’t behave itself inappropriately

Love doesn’t seek its own way and is not provoked

Love takes no account of evil and doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness

It rejoices with the truth, bears all things, believes all things

Love hopes all things, endures all things

Love never fails

That is what love is.