Unshackled Moments ~ December 26 ~ Love

Advent has ended, Christ is come. Let all the world rejoice. But we don't rejoice. Not everyone, and certainly not all the time. In everything, every moment and situation we do not find the time or the ability to have a grateful heart or to rejoice in the Lord. There is a Christmas song, probably more than one that mentions that this is the time of year that we remember Love has come. And it is. The last week of Advent, the week I took vacation from writing, has love as its theme.

Perhaps there is a part of all us that hears about that love and feels unimpressed and unmoved by the idea of it all. Love is an overused word in the English language. I loved Christmas dinner and all the amazing food my mother cooked. For that matter, I love my mother and my father. I love my nieces and nephews that were running around the house and the ones who weren't there. I love my wife. She is my treasure. I love my new Batman T-shirt and my boots. I love the Texas Tech Red Raiders, and I love that they are going to play LSU in their bowl game next week. I love Christmas music and staying up late to watch Christmas movies.

I could go on and on. We love all kinds of things with all kinds of love. When I write those words, I assume most people don't think that I have the same type of feeling for Christmas dinner as I do for my wife. We mean different things depending on the context when we say the word love. For that matter, there are meany times when we use the word to illicit a response or find a way to manipulate someone else when it isn't felt at all. So we can sometimes get a little ambivalent about love.

Really, I think we sometimes don't understand what it means when we say or hear that God loves us. Actually, I would say most times. We don't have proper context to assign it meaning. We know it should be a greater type of love than that for a wife or family member, but we act more like God loves us more like a football fan loves their team when they are winning but won't stand by them when they have a bad season.

For love Christ came. The Father loved the world to such a great extent that He sent His Son. The Son came and died for love. The Greeks understood that love is a complicated idea. I love cherries and my wife, but that love is not even remotely the same idea. So they had different words for the different ideas. The love that brought Christ to Bethlehem and took Him to the cross is called agape in the Greek. It means the highest form of love. Whatever the highest most pure form of love is, that's the way God loves us.

The problem is that we don't even comprehend that. We can strive to love with pure love, but we fall so short. We don't love God perfectly.  Nor do we love anyone or anything perfectly, purely or without pollutants. So how can we understand something we have no experience to associate meaning by? We can understand certain concepts and ideas though, even when we never quite know the reality of the concept ourselves. There is an amazing and deep love that a person can have for someone who does not return it. Perhaps years go by while one person rejects all other options and waits patiently for the other to notice and return the love. Getting nothing in return they give their heart completely. In fiction eventually the feeling would be mutual and the two would become a couple, because we can't stand the idea that such love not be rewarded and victorious. But all too often it's not. That's how God loves us. Like the lover anticipating the happily ever after with a bride to be that most times forgets He exists.

And there's the love that makes a mother willing to die for her child or a soldier fall on a grenade to protect his brothers. Yeah, God loves us that way too. The cross shows that. However we attribute the greatest idea of the purest love, that what we can find in Jesus. As we put Christmas behind us and turn our eyes toward a new year, let us go forward with an awareness of great love. Hold the definition, highest love, close to heart so that we can keep in mind our best understanding of what it means when we say that God loves us. Then, let us pray to return His love in the same form.

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