Love Is Not

1 Corinthians 13:4-13 ©

Three things last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love

Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.

  Love does not come to an end. But if there are gifts of prophecy, the time will come when they must fail; or the gift of languages, it will not continue for ever; and knowledge – for this, too, the time will come when it must fail. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect; but once perfection comes, all imperfect things will disappear. When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and think like a child, and argue like a child, but now I am a man, all childish ways are put behind me. Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known.

  In short, there are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.

Love sells a lot of soap and it is the cause of wars and divorce and every evil you can imagine.  We should outlaw love or at least what we consider as love to be.  

In some respects, we ask too much of this emotion.  Love as an emotion is love at its most volatile.  Love is what attracts us to others and it is a jealous guardian because it knows that if it fails that the heart will be in pain and be broken and the heart caught up in emotional love is always on guard against pain. When we fall in love, our emotions run high. Should we marry the person, love as emotion will continue for some time.  But then, after an unspecified amount of time this type of love will burn itself out because it is not meant to be a permanent thing. 

 Love is meant to rise above the emotional state and become something that you choose every day.  Emotional love sees perfection and blurs, just a bit, the vision of reality.  Love as a choice allows itself to see imperfection and still love the other person in spite of the fact that he leaves his socks on the floor or she doesn't push the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube.  The everyday sort of love allows us to see the real person and not just an ideal or caricature of them.  It allows us to see inside, and see that they have a heart, they are kind, they are gentle, they are not selfish, in other words, we see our partner more like God see them and the fire of this love is fueled by God as the Holy Spirit as he makes manifest the inner workings of your spouse over time.  This love burns less brightly than the emotional love but it leads to a life of joy with your spouse as you work through life together. 

The danger of trying to cling on to emotional love is that it requires more and more focus on the good and less and less focus on the bad and soon all you can see if one good charism and a thousand bad ones and you think that the fire has gone out of your marriage.  You do not understand that fire has dimmed so that you can see and rejoice in the differences between you and form an even stronger bond by seeing the other person as they are.  

God loves us very much.  He sent His Son to go to the Cross for us.  And He loves us with the love that shows us as we are, and He loves us as we are and He wants us to experience what He does.  Read the passage again. You ARE still in love, aren't you?