What is this thing LOVE?
What is this thing called love?
This funny thing called love?
Just who can solve its mystery?
That's why I ask the Lord in Heaven above
What is this thing called Love?
Love seems like such a simple thing. I know it when I feel it! Don't you? But we call lots of things "love" that are not really love at all. There is lust that we mistake for love. There are convenient mutually beneficial relationships that we mistake for love. There are even attachments to things (I do love my iPhone) that we mistake for love.This makes it all so much more complex. Love is a mysterious funny thing.
When you love someone with a pure love there is no rational reason for that love. When I think about loving someone in the purest sense I remember seeing my baby sister, Katie, for the first time. She is 16 years younger than I am and I vividly remember seeing her for the first time when she was hours old. I saw her and picked her up into my arms. Timid and nervous I held her and there she was. There she was and there I was. In that moment I could only stare at her in awe, wonder, and love. She was. She was and that was more than enough for her to be perfect and loved in my eyes.
This love for my sister is like the love God has for you. God loves you because you are you and there is no other reason for that love. God loves you because you are. God choose to create you because he loved you just like you would be. When God created the heavens and the earth he knew about you. He knew about everything. He knew about everything you would do. In that moment, knowing all the good things and all the bad things about you God loved you and said "yes" to you. God love you with a pure love just because you are.
There is nothing you could ever say or do that could make God love you any more or less because God loves you. There is nothing you could ever not say or not do to make God love you any more or less. GOD LOVES YOU! He loves you so much that, in the person of Jesus Christ, he left heaven to be sacrificed on a cross so that you could love him to and become his forever friend. So that you could become a saint.
The first step towards that friendship is knowing and feeling that you are loved. Check out next week's post to see what the second step is.
Stay Salty my friends,
Charles+