A Re-post on Love…
Agape love is… profound concern for the well-being of another, without any desire to control that other, to be thanked by that other, or to enjoy the process.
~Madeleine L’Engle (1918- )
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
~1Corinthians 13:8-12
This new creation into which He has made us is real. It is not just some theological construct to make us feel better about the fact that we have made some decision to trust G_d with our future. No, like the Major, Ian Thomas said “The all things have replaced the old things.” We are made totally new when we fully turn our lives over to Christ and trust only in His work to make us into what He wants us to be.
Oh my.
Yeah, even the hate and selfishness that was the bulwark and bane of our existence begins to fade, and one day we wake up to a jaw-dropping revelation:
We love people. Really.
We just care about them. We want them to feel safe, and warm and full and honored. We want them to feel the Love that He has poured out on us – and we want it in ways and depths we never knew we had.
Delicious.
This writer fell deeply in love with a woman the other night. No! Not like you gentle readers might think. It had nothing to do with any of that other (albeit beautiful and exciting) stuff. He was thinking about some things that this person had shared, some of the pain, some of the joy of life – and just the “be” in being in relationship with another person. And suddenly, he was just overcome with a burning desire for the well-being of that other person. No strings attached. He just loved and cared about another human being as much as he cared for himself. He wanted to know that person more deeply and to be known more deeply by the other.
Oh surely, i could never assume to have such pure motives towards any other person! But the Jesus in us, working through the new creation He has wrought is perfecting a work in us, whereby His children actually start to act and feel and see like He Acts and Feels and Sees.
The real us begins to emerge in and through the spillover of the Love He has poured onto and into us. And as He deepens and bores out the vessel that we are, somehow our capacity for His Love begins to increase – and somehow we are then supernaturally desirous and able to pour out this Love on others in ever more increasing and coherent ways. Fear fades, joy takes its place and we just begin to live in the life that is a perpetual filling and being filled and pouring out of Life and Love in Him.
There is a real us, when the us we are is in Christ. We become beautiful, gorgeous, and infilled with Love that we might love others to the point that they too want to be filled the same way with the same Love they feel.
L_RD, make us ever more real.
