Love. What a crazy word in our world. Who knows what it really means? Love is something everybody knows is a good thing, but not everybody actually knows how to define. People have their ideas. Love is a feeling. Love is acceptance. Love is unconditional. Love goes the extra mile. Love isn’t forced. Love is romance. All these things run through the mind of our culture, which seeks to define love for itself. Love maybe is some of these things, love maybe isn't some of these things. Maybe it is partly these things, or maybe it depends on the context. What is fascinating to me is that love seems to be something universally known, yet unable to be defined in a single phrase or sentiment. Love is painted across all of our stories, whether we recognize it or not. Love is what drives us. We are never not loving. It sounds crazy doesn’t it? The man cheats on his wife, not because he didn’t love her, but because he loved something else more. Maybe his own desire to feel loved again. Love drew him. The issue is that this love found the answer to its longing in betraying his oath made in love. Love surrounds all we do. Love is how hard we are going to work on our school assignment for tomorrow. Love is how much of our money we keep for ourselves. Love is the distance we will go in whatever it is we are doing. Consider something you enjoy doing. Sports, watching TV, reading, being with friends; any of it. Why is it so easy to give away our time (which we always complain about not having enough of) to the altar of one of these, but not to our work or being with someone who is not so easy to be around? It’s a love thing. We don’t count the minutes when we are doing what we love. According to one of my favorite artists, “love is the strongest stuff.” Love will go to any limit.
So my question is simply this: What do you love?
It’s really easy to know. Let me ask the question this way: Where do you spend your free time? What do you do when you don’t have something you need to do? Or what is it that you think you need to do?
We are all lovers. To be human is to constant be loving something. I think we were made to love something of infinite capacity like our love, a well never-ending that could quench the deep thirst of our soul.