Love

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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.

How can we know God? The beauty of friendship.

How can we know God?

It might be a sense of God’s mind, or of his heart, beyond humanity’s mind and heart. It might be the grasp of the complexity and beauty of the Universe, or the wonder of a new born child. It might be the joy of a vast and wonderful landscape before our eyes.

Some experience God as Father: the source of our life, and our provision, and an ever-present source of comfort. Some look to him as Master: and, relative to us, he is the Master – of life, of death, and of love. Some see God as Saviour: the one who can make us right, restore our broken hearts, and change our wrong into what is right.

For me now, the joy of knowing God is found in friendship. Why friendship? He allows me to be who I am, though he calls me to be better. He gives me space to work through my struggles, grasping the fragility of my humanity. He beckons, but does not force.

Friendship means choice.

The beauty of friendship is the beauty of the freedom we have been given: to choose, between what is right and wrong – to choose who it is we want to influence the direction and formation of our hearts and lives.

I choose Christ: the Master of Goodness, in offering his own life for us – my Friend.

Who will you choose?