What is the purpose of life?
When all is stripped away, when money is laid aside, when aspirations are lost, or found, when life begins, and when it ends, what’s it all about? What’s it all for?
Love.
Paul, in the Bible, describes love. He says it is patient, and kind – it doesn’t envy, or boast. Love never fails. Life is meaningless without love.
But what is love?
Is love that attraction you feel for that guy over there, or that girl? Is it that power within that might lead you to die protecting that little girl, or boy? Is it the power of friendship: of helping one another – of listening to one another, and sharing in each other’s joys and struggles?
All of these things, and more.
There is a deeper kind of love: there is a deeper searching for love.
There is God.
Beyond our human kind of love, vital in its own right, needed in life, and in death, is God’s kind of love.
God’s love is all encompassing, and all-consuming. It demands our all, and in turn gives us our all back again, though changed.
To gain God’s kind of love, we need to give up our lives: in order to truly gain them.
Love is an offering: love is the source and reason for life.
God is Love.
There are two reasons for living – two callings greater than we are in life, that Jesus gave to us:
Love God, and love humanity – even our enemies.
Love: it’s the only way to truly live.