Yesterday was the big love day. Did you give someone candy? Get any of that little hard candy hearts like we got in grade school? Love is obviously an important concept in life. And, to a large degree, becomes the foundation for everything you do in life. Each semester when I face new students, I start by reminding them (or sadly, in many cases, explaining for the first time) that they are in college because of a passion. I help them seek out the “WHY” of their being in class, because, as I tell them, if you don’t have that “WHY,” that passion, then when the pressure really builds during the semester, you’ll fold.
In other words, you must have love. You must pursue your future based on the fact that you really love something and want it so bad.
Yet, so often, in our society, we have a poor understanding of love. Mostly, for us its emotions and sex, what the Greeks called eros. Love the Greeks, though, as they had other words for what we call love. They understood that emotional love, sexual love, was indeed a form of love, but it wasn’t the only kind. They knew that often people could love one another deeply without it involving sexual tension. The Greeks called that phileo; we get the word and city of Philadephia from their word–the city of brotherly love.
Deeper still though was what I believe is really at the root of the experience we call love–sacrifice. Their word was agape, and the core idea is the notion of giving all of yourself sacrificially. Typically Christians use this in terms of love towards God, or love towards another Christian, the “love one another” concept. Yet, the notion of this love is, to me, the root of success.
If I only have emotional feelings, a sense of sexual attraction, for a thing, well, that wanes over time. This is clearly seen in the realm of sex. We see someone that we deem “hot” or “attractive” and all we can think of is having sex with that person, being with that person emotionally. Yet, what happens over time? You know already because we all see the “beautiful people” of Hollywood or sports fame, and for most, they get bored with their trophy wife or trophy husband and go out seeking more emotional sex with another “hot” person. They got easily bored. We all do, whether its with a new game we have started to play or a TV show that we watch and claim that “we love it.”
The idea of love goes beyond the mere sharing of positive feelings for one another that we see in brotherly love. Its deeper than that. If you want to really succeed at life, you must be willing to sacrifice everything. Let nothing get in the way of your dreams. You’ll happily pay any price to get it done.
The leader Paul from the Bible hits on this idea in a letter to the third great Greek city of the region–Corinth. He wrote, “If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always “me first,” doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end. Love never dies.
I hope you had someone, parent, child, dear friend, lover, that you could share yesterday with. But deeper still, I hope you know what true love is. Make it a core aspect of your life.