Love.

I was walking out the door to go study at Barnes and Noble today, and as I was walking out I poked into my mom's room, said goodbye to her and told her 'I love you'. As I was walking away I thought to myself, "Do I really mean that when I say it?" I started thinking of how many times a day I say that phrase. I say it when I get off of the phone with friends, family or meaningful people, when I say goodbye to my mom and brother on my way out the door, or even to my pets [is that weird?]. The fact is that the phrase 'I love you' is meant to be much more meaningful, and I feel like I, and our culture, have lost that meaning.

I think we live in a culture that doesn't understand what love is. This has been said over and over again by theologians and Christian thinkers, but it's something that is so predominate in our world today I think it needs to be said again and again so that people start believing the truth about love. Literature, entertainment, music, and even friends have so skewed our idea of love and left us with so many fantasies of what love is supposed to look like.

David Knopp, who traveled with on tour with the APJ team this September described the movie romance phenomenon saying that in movies "people fall in love, get in an argument, make up, and the BAM! they get married." Unfortunately [wait... actually fortunately], reality is nothing like this. It's unfortunate for us if we've believed that the love entertainment portrays is what love actually is.

When you have studied what true love is, the love that media has created looks so fake.
Have you read 1 Corinthians 13 lately? It's the famous love chapter, and it's quoted by non-Christians and Christians alike in discussions of love. In this chapter though, we can find the characteristics and guidelines of real love. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus was the ultimate expression of love and the he fulfilled every characteristic of love that is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 13 and in the whole Bible? He did.
And yet, we as humans desire love from each other more. It's unbelievable that we would actually choose a human's love over God's all-fulfilling and sacrificial love... But we do.

Because love is such a predominate theme in everything we hear, watch, and read it's easy to get wrapped up in asking ourselves questions about love such as: "Is it love when he asks me out on our first date? Is it love when he holds my hand? Is it love when we have our first kiss? Are married? When are you in love?" Because, after all, falling in love is our ultimate purpose, right? Culture may say so, but it's not.
Here's a thought: Are we so consumed with the fantasy of being 'in love' that we've forgotten what it is to actually 'love' someone? Because being in love with someone and showing someone love are entirely different. When we say that we want to be in love, we're basically saying that we want to be loved by someone. We are desiring companionship with someone, a desire we were created with, by the way. [that desire can be fulfilled in so many ways, some that are wrong, but that's a discussion for a different post!]
However, I think we were also created for more. Jesus combined the command for us to love God with all of our heart to include loving our neighbors as ourselves [Matthew 22: 36-40]. I think that if our mindset were more focused on loving people and encouraging them, rather than dreaming of the day that we may fall in love, we'll be much more effective. After all, 'love is not selfish' [I Cor. 13:5]. What does that look like? Stop looking at them as a potential husband or wife and start looking at them as your brother or sister in Christ. Something that encouraged and challenged me while on the APJ tour was the thought that God has created me, as a woman, to be a special encouragement to the men in my life. This is impossible for me to do  effectively if I'm focused on myself and what I want and not that guy. We must love effectively.

So when you tell someone you love them, mean it, study for yourself what true love is so that you can see when what you're being shown is fake and unrealistic, and lastly, focus on loving others and not being 'in love'.
As a last thought about that: God could calling you to be single for your whole life [or at least a good portion of it]. Wouldn't it be disappointing if 'falling in love' with a man [or woman] was all you focused on only to realize that you had been fantasizing about something that wasn't going to happen? Love others in purity and out of kindness, not selfishness.

-Meaghan