“Love is the only practical solution to the problems of humankind.” Love can carry us to great lengths and great heights.
*LOVE MOTIVATES US THE BEST
Love is one of the most powerful motivating forces that we know of. Love can carry us to great lengths and great heights of achivement.There’s the love that knits the members of a family together in the face of conflict and problems that would tear apart any lesser bond.
There’s also the work we do OUT OF LOVE. . For those of us who work in the not-for-profit sector or in the church, the motivation is not primarily money, or fame, or power. It’s love that motivates. In the case of ministry , it’s the love of God that keeps us going.
Whatever your occupation or a vocation, if you do it out of love, you’re much more likely to succeed than if you’re simply in it for the money.
*LOVE CAN CARRY US
to lengths that nothing else can.
And this is equally true in areas of life where we might least expect it, like politics or international relationships. For example, love of country can accomplish what the force of law never can in motivating young people to enlist in the armed forces of a nation.
*CAN LOVE BE PART OF THE PROBLEM?
But love of country can be manipulated by political leaders to intensify conflict and widen the divisions between nations and peoples. Especially destructive is the blind love that does not stop to ask hard questions of a nation’s leaders.
When you really think about it, rather than seeing love as a solution to all the problems of life, we might just as well see it as part of the problem, as when two men love the same woman, or when you love someone who does not love you in return.
After decades of training in how to improve our interpersonal relationships, after years of psychotherapy, after a whole revolution in our thinking about gender and sex, love remains the number one problem of our personal lives.
Some of the most tragic situations in life result from our search for love. Consider the alarming increase in the number of teenage pregnancies, the spread of various venereal diseases, and perhaps most tragic of all is AIDS. So many of our problems arise out of the need and the hunger for love. As we reach out for the affection and simple human contact that we all need, desire and deserve, we sometimes stumble and fall. Love not only fails as a solution to the problems of life, love creates new problems of its own.
*JESUS COMES WITH HELP
Where we face the greatest paradox of life, the teachings of Jesus offer the greatest help. Jesus did not push love as a panacea. When He poke of love, He was aware of its strengths, He was also aware of its weakness. Jesus understood both the lengths and the limits of love.He knew it when He gave the command of love.
“This is my commandment, that you love one another even as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that you lay down your life for your friends.” John15:4
Jesus believed that the love which the disciples shared would eventually spread. It would extend its reach to every family, race and tribe.
Jesus went as far as anyone in demonstrating the lengths and the reach of love. But he was also aware that there are very clear and necessary limits in our loving. Real love is not blind.
*REAL LOVE IS NOT BLIND
A professor of psychology at Yale, Robert J. Sternberg, Doctor Love has discovered: “The way I look at it, love has three elements. One is emotional, another is motivational, the third is cognitive, if you have only the emotional, that immediate gush of feeling, then its simply infatuation. If you have only the motivational, its probably more like a close friendship. But if the emotional, the motivational, and the cognitive all exist simultaneously, then you have complete romantic love.”
Nearly 2000 years before the Love Doctor was even born, Jesus said much the same thing, only he did not limit himself to romantic love. He spoke of love in its widest dimension when he said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. And thy neighbor as thyself.”
When He added that crucial word, MIND, Jesus was speaking of what Dr. Sternberg calls the cognitive dimension. But for Jesus the mind was not simply the seat of intelligence, it was also the seat of conscience. In addition to the cognitive dimension, Jesus saw that love has an ethical and a moral dimension.
“One does not set out to build a house, or a tower,” said Jesus, “without first sitting down to count the cost.” And this is especially true when we begin to build the house of love.
Love has its limits.Most of us learn as parents that we cannot set out blindly to raise the maximum number of children. Real love requires that we give thoughtful consideration to the quality of life that we are able to provide. A reasonable parent must weigh the love of children against the added costs.
Likewise, as we set out to build a network of friendships we must ask realistically, how many different human beings can we relate to closely enough to number among our true friends.
*THE JOURNEY OF LOVE
Journey of love is one which each and every one of us is called to take. It is the only journey that really matters much at all. For God is love.
As we begin our journey we must confess, love is not something we possess.
Just the opposite; it takes possession of us! It rises up in our midst despite our best efforts to stamp it down. Often when we least expect, Love takes us by surprise, it strikes us to the root and core of our being, changing us .
Love is not a virtue to be attained by training, not an accomplishment to be achieved.At the bottom of love is a gift of God’s grace.
True love requires more than an outburst of feeling; it requires a disciplined application of energy and imagination. Love requires a realistic assessment of one’s own strengths, weaknesses and limits. But more than anything, love requires faith.What the love of God requires God empowers us to give.
We believe that GOD IS LOVE. And this makes all the difference in the world.