By Kenneth Stepp
Love… It’s a wonderful feeling. It feels good to say, I love you, even better to hear, I love you. The word love gets thrown around like baseballs on training day. If love is just a word or a feeling to you, you’ve lost the plot completely.
Love is something I struggle to put into words. Perhaps it’s energy. It certainly is on it’s own. The power of love is incalculable. It cannot be explained with math yet it’s both heavy and lightweight. Love is a mystery.
I’ve spent many years trying to understand love fully. It helps that I have loved before, not everyone has loved or been loved in the context that I’m speaking about now. I’ve said it before. I love you and I love pizza, should not have the same meaning.
So, why is love a mystery? I believe what we call love today and what love really is are two very different things. Most today say they fell in love but then left because something happened. I love you but. I love you unless. And, I love you until. None of these statements are true when talking about real love.
Qualifiers:
Real love, or what I call, unconditional love, has no qualifiers. You see, unconditional means, without conditions. No qualifiers. It’s what causes a person to stay when times get tough. I once met a girl who said she married a guy for 5 years, he contracted cancer and she left. Her words to me were, I didn’t sign up for that. Had she read the words in my mind, yes you did, should have been in a quote bubble above my head.
As a single today, above the age of having more kids, and at a time in my life where I’ve been there and done that more times and ways than I can count. Should I find forever, we won’t have the roots that building a family brings, or buying our first home, or any number of other things that grow the foundation life lives on. All we will have is us. The roots must be made of real love.
There is a story in the bible about real love. Hosea and Gomer. I encourage everyone who desires real love but can’t recall what it looks like to read it. It speaks of how Hosea loved her with no qualifiers. After she left him to be a party girl for years. He still sought her. When she had nothing left, looks, youth, etc. He redeemed her. He loved her without condition.
I believe we all have the ability to get lost these days. So much has changed. Should we find ourselves “in love”, I doubt most of us understand it like we once did. For me, I want depth. I require depth. I’ve had shallow love. It wasn’t love at all, not the kind I search for anyway. Having tasted the depths of real unconditional love, I can never go back to pizza love.
Every relationship will go through hard times. Every love will be tested. They say iron sharpens iron. Perhaps iron also protects iron. Yesterday I needed to be rescued from my own thoughts. Yesterday I escaped those thoughts and left town. I had to be somewhere that would help me heal and that’s what I did.
If you find yourself partnered with someone and you’ve exchanged, I love you’s. Remember this. When you guys begin taking crossfire from the world, and you will. Make sure they are the type of lover who jumps in the foxhole with you. Not the one that leaves when the bullets start flying. I love you means I’ll be here, I’m present, I’ll stand with you no matter what. Why? Because I love you more than I love pizza.
#comefindme
