defining love, part one

What is love? If you had to define it right this second, what are the first things that come to your mind? I asked a few of my friends to define love in 50 words or less, with the caveat that they had to write down whatever immediately came to mind. Here are some of the responses I got:

"All the best emotions. Rolled into one."

"Love is being willing to sacrifice one's will for another. Love is always wanting the best for the other person. Love is letting go even when it hurts. Love is setting an example to others. Love is a beautiful feeling that surpasses common sense thinking."

"Love is consuming. Love is wonderful. Love is painful. Love can't be explained rationally."

"Love, it's a safe, non-judgmental commitment in which you give selflessly and unconditionally, and are challenged to grow into the best person you can be."

Love. Four letters. Enough meaning to keep you thinking for a lifetime. The variety in these responses didn't really surprise me. But a common thread weaves through all of them. Love is good. Love is something you want. Love not only can be painful, it often is. Novelists, and poets, and musicians, and philosophers have spent centuries writing, and singing, and talking about love. And yet, it's a question people keep coming back to: what is love? In some form or other, all of our souls seem to long for love and most of us spend our lives hoping for love or disappointed by love or both. Is love what makes us human then? Can we live without love? Can we live with love, even when it hurts so much?

One of the most often quoted passages from the Bible is on love. In Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, you'll find a chapter that is read at the vast majority of Christian weddings, and even many non-Christian weddings, with verses that have wound their way into our common understanding of what love is:

"Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things." 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Reading that passage, it's easy to understand why it's hard to define love. Believing all things and hoping all things and enduring all things aren't things that come easily to many people. The inherent self-sacrificing nature of love is perhaps the most difficult and the most poignant part of love, but also the part no one seems to question. Love and self-sacrifice are intertwined in a way that only makes sense when you're in the midst of love.

I like to think love comes easily to me. I'm constantly telling people that I really don't care about anything but loving on people. The only real evidence I have that this is truly how I live my life is that my heart constantly seems to be getting broken in one way or another--whether by friends or family or enemies or people I don't even know all that well. And yet, without fail, despite the ongoing heartache, I endure, I believe, I hope. I can't explain why, except to point to an earlier part of Paul's chapter on love:

"And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:2

You can have everything in the world, you can know everything in the world, you can do everything in the world, you can even have the power to lift a mountain up out of the ground and move it wherever you want at will, but without love you are nothing. Without love I am nothing. Nothing. The lack or absence of anything at all. I think this is how, in my own mind, I justify living life with my heart held out in my hand for anyone and everyone I meet to grab a hold of, even if just for a moment. By any rationale standard, this isn't the safest way to go. It involves an incredible amount of risk and repeated instances of heartbreak. But, after 25 years of holding my heart out to the world, I've realized I'd rather spend my life enduring and believing and hoping than spend my life as nothing. I'd rather spend my life living through constant heartache--even if sometimes I feel like I might die from the weight of it all--than spend my life having everything else but never having what I need.

So what is love? I don't think love is something I fully understand. Not yet. Maybe I never will. In fact, I'm convinced I never will because of 1 John 4:8, which simply states, "God is love." To fully understand love is to fully understand God, and I'm convinced that's something I will never be able to do. What I do know is that I want the kind of love Paul talks about in his letter to the Corinthians. I want this kind of love because, "If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us," (1 John 4:12).

This, then, is how I choose to live my life: loving as much as I can, loving as hard as I can, loving as easily as I can, loving as often as I can, and loving as quickly as I can, no matter how terrifying it is, and not matter how much heartbreak it means. Because in the end, the more I know about love and feel love and give love, the more I know God and that makes all the heartbreak, both imaginable and unimaginable worth it...

I'll connect this back to crazy love in "defining love, part two".