“I don't think so, Hannah. I don't
think you could possibly love me more than I love you. A mama's love
is the biggest.”
“No, Mama,” she says. “My love is
the winner. I love you so much...it's SO bigger...”
She stretches her arms out in front of me. “It will take all day
long.”
All day long. Now that's a big kind of
love.
I have thought about the concept of
love a great deal throughout this Christmas season. Those ideas of
love and grace and peace that are tied in with our Savior just seemed
to have permeated this year's holiday in particular for me –
and led me
to ponder 'what is love' in a deeper way than ever before.
It's no secret that I'm a Christian who
believes that God's love is absolutely unconditional, but I
could likely never fully convince you of that if you're reluctant to
believe it. I do, however, understand why there's so much reluctance.
We're not God, so we fail at love.
“Love never fails.” - 1 Corinthians
13:8. “The earth is full of His unfailing love.” - Psalm 33:5.
It's constant. It's everlasting. It's
incapable of fault. Without flaw.
It's perfect.
I have never experienced that kind of
love from another human being. I've certainly caught glimpses of it
in others, in the significant but fleeting moments of my life, but
how could we ever make perfection everlasting when what we know of
love in this world is so broken?
There's an eternity to God's love that
most of us don't see in the human examples in our lives. That's why
our concepts of love can be so vastly different from each other, and
also why they can be so incredibly messed up.
Truthfully, I tend to get frustrated
this time of year when I see how often God, who is love, gets
rejected while other types of 'love' are so readily accepted and
embraced.
Does 'unfailing love' mean getting
everything we want? Does it mean always tolerating any behavior and
never encouraging that it be made better? Does it mean it's okay to
be abandoned or used and make promises we'll never keep? Does it mean
giving conditional love and expecting unconditional in return?
You would think so, given how human
beings treat each other and what we seem to expect from God. We're
broken. And our own experiences are too deeply woven into our ideas
about love that our past hurts prevent us from truly understanding
what 'unconditional' or 'unfailing' love looks like.
There's far too much failure. We are
not good enough examples of love for one another. And
we are rarely looking to the right source for our example. It's
patient and kind, not proud. Not self-seeking. Not keeping score.
It's not the selfish mess that we see everywhere we turn.
He loves us all day long.
Every day. No matter what. Until forever.
I
truly can't imagine what life would look like if we learned how to
love like that. Yet it's what we were born to do –
love one another. We should pursue it the way that it pursues
us, in an endlessly steadfast, unrelenting sort of way. Never giving
up on finding it and learning how to truly give it. That's the kind
of New Year's Resolution we should all jump at the chance to make.
