L.O.V.E.

"if you judge people, you have no time to love them." ~ Mother Teresa

What does it mean to love someone? We use this word "love" so often, from the "love" that we express to our kids, parents, family members, or close friends, to the "love" or affection and romance that we express to a spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, or lover; love is such a popular word. Countless songs have been written about it, movies and plays made about it. Love is often called the very essence of life. It has been said that, "it is better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all." So it is fair to say that love is one of the great motivators of the human spirit.

We know that when we say that we "love" a family member, we are not necessarily talking about the same thing as when we say that we "love" our favorite entertainer, nor are we talking about the same "love" we have for our spouse. One can argue that love ranges on a scale starting from 'Eros" love, which is more of a kind of lust or desire, to "Agape" or unconditional love, which does not waver based on circumstances. For instance, I may say that I have "fallen in love with a young lady", what is often called "love at first sight", when the real issue is that I am very sexually attracted to her and this attraction clouds my thinking and causes me to say that I "love" her; maybe it should really called "lust at first sight." To be fair, I may come to love her unconditionally, but at that moment, my "love" for her is really based on an ulterior motive, which is a sexual attraction or an attraction based on some quality in her that I admire.

Ultimately, the real goal for all of us is to love unconditionally, or to have the kind of "Agape" love that God has for us. The kind of love implied in Romans 5:8, where it says, "but God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. " in 1 John 4:10, it says further, "This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins." The key issue in these verses is that God was not compelled to love us because of our promises of obedience or even futile attempts to obey Him. His love is what can be called a one-way love, a love that is not predicated on the actions of the person(s) loved. Too often, when we say that we "love" someone, we "love" with strings attached - basically implying, "I love you as long as you behave or act in the way that I like or consider appropriate".

There is a reason why the mother-child relationship is one of the most celebrated ones in our culture, because for the most part, the closest thing that most people experience to unconditional love is the love they get from a parent, usually the mother. This is not to say that there are not dads who don't love like this, but we all know that especially with the high rate of single parenthood in this nation, most children are raised by their mothers and they get their models of love from their mothers alone. Mothers these days carry a huge burden, from parenting, which is a full time job, to nurturing, to even being breadwinners, in many cases the primary breadwinner. To the child, the mother is not only often a model of love, but a sort of super being who does it all.

To love is to be able to look beyond what may be symptoms of a deeper problem - bad behavior, addiction, etc - and realize that a lot of times the habits that we dislike in other people are simply secondary issues to deeper problems. It is easy for me to ask why a person does drugs, is sexually promiscuous, has anger issues etc, but it is tougher for me to actually listen to them and see what has led them down that behavioral path. It does not mean that we justify or sanction bad behavior, but that we realize that our behavior is often symptomatic of deeper needs that are not being met. Too often, we are so busy making rash covert judgments about people, their clothing, their body art, tastes in music, their bad or inappropriate habits and so on, and in doing so, we spend very little time connecting with people and getting to know them and love them..

The essence of loving others stems from the realization that we are who we are as God's children not as a function of our performance for God, but as a result of his one-way love for us. We see glimpses of this love in our society, but for many people, these glimpses are few and far between, and whether we admit it or not, we are all in search of unconditional love, and we will go to great lengths to find it, even if what we find is just an mirage or pseudo form of this love. This is why kids will join a gang if they don't see healthy alternatives in their community, this is why a woman or man may become promiscuous, because they falsely equate sex with love. People will go to great lengths to try and find this love. Some erroneously believe that if they achieve great wealth and or fame they will be loved, only to realize that the "love" that they get is really contingent on their wealth and fame, and is not really unconditional. Sometimes, it takes them losing everything to find out that they had few, if any, real friends.

We are told that as Christians, our love for one another is what is supposed to set us apart. Not our stance on the moral issues. Not the extensive list of things that we do and don't do. But our love for one another. It is not finding this love that leaves many people disillusioned with religion, but to be fair, this love does exists in many spiritual circles. It is my prayer that this kind of love continues to be nurtured within you as it spreads to others around you.

Stephen Oladotun Akinduro