Love has been on my mind lately!
Lately I’ve been experiencing a synchronicity as a variety of different areas of my life are pointing me toward love. I have been thinking about love and the many questions about it. What is love? From where does love come? What does it mean for God to love us? What does it mean to love ourselves and our neighbor?
I have been reflecting on how Jesus was the embodiment of God’s love for us, and how we in turn can embody God’s love for others. (This was the topic of the sermon I gave at All Pilgrims Christian Church yesterday morning).
Many people like to start out their new year with resolutions. They will go to the gym more often, spend more time with family and friends, organize and/or get rid of things they no longer need. Many people also forget their resolutions by February or March, but despite this, we keep making them year after year.
This year, I encourage you to start out the new year with love. It’s a new year, a new decade, a new start. How will love inform your actions this hour, this day, this year? How do you love those it is easy for you to love, and how do you love when it is difficult?
I will leave you with the “love chapter” of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, to meditate on:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 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 do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.