Love

Love. a simple, four letter word. Yet this simple word holds an incredible amount of meaning. In 1 Chorinthians 13, the bible describes love as patient, kind, trusting, protective, and humble. Love, as in the bible, is an amazing gift that God has blessed us with.
Like many things, however, our world messed it up. We have turned love into an emotion; misplacing loving people for loving things. We love how we look, we love our accomplishments, we love movies, sports, music, and food. We abuse the word love, and because of this abuse we have begun to forget how to actually love. I know I am not very experienced in the art of love myself. Yes, I truly love my family and sometimes my friends, and I make my best effort to love God and his plans for me, but that is where my experience with love comes to an end.
Our world has become a place of impure love. Whether it be a physically impure relationship, impure motives, or simply not following God's description of love, it seems as though our culture has turned our back on true love almost altogether. A phrase comes to mind: I want to be your lover. This statement is immediately associated with sexual desire and fulfillment. When I see that phrase though, I see so much more potential. I want to be God's lover. I want to be able to change my motives from loving myself to being a lover of others. I believe that if we start loving each other as we are designed to, it will help us better understand the love God has for us and expects from us.
I have always been one that wants to marry early. And I have explained to many people that there is a certain love one has for his family, another that he has for his friend, another for God, and still another for a wife. I have had a good experience with those first three so I want to be able to extend my love to a woman. While I still have the desire to marry early, I have begun to realize that I do not need to be married to extend my love. I can start practicing loving my future family by loving people with a biblical perspective in mind. Greeting people with a holy kiss might be a little weird to most, but I can make appropriate changes to the way I love people in a way that reflects a biblical love. maybe I'm rambling...
I have just been thinking a lot of how relationships work in our culture. For the most part I'm not impressed. I believe people need to stop acting on their emotions, and start loving people because God loves them.
Here is a great quote from a really good author, Dallas Willard:
"A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will(which is one of the topics of his book, renovation of the heart) is left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings."

I'm working on loving you,

Burke