Love is

Love is a foot rub after a long, hard day.

Love is a home-cooked meal loaded with all your faves. Love is your hubby driving 40 minutes to get your favorite cookie for Valentine’s Day. Love can be a lot of things.

For my hubby and I, we’re just two people living life from our hearts in our own way. We extend grace and cultivate a space for us to be ourselves. This is a byproduct of a relationship that’s centered around God. While we do the internal work to draw near to Him, He works externally through our bonds with one another, our kids, and our families.

Biblically, love is patient. Love is kind. Love is hopeful and full of compromise. It never loses faith, and it endures through every circumstance.

This is the agape love that Jesus wants us to share.

We could spend an entire blog talking about each of these attributes, but I’m only going to focus on one, being kind.

If we’re honest, a lot of us aren’t kind; whether it be to ourselves, our friends or family, our partners, whoever. Humanity has a natural proclivity to evil. It literally goes against our nature to be kind to others.

Loving yourself, let alone other people, is something that should be simple but oftentimes it's not because we forget to root our love in God. When your “love” is based on approval, materialism, or worldly things, it makes it conditional. Transactional. 

The one thing love should never do is take.

I’ve learned over the years that true unconditional love is rooted in kindness. Now, that doesn’t mean you give, give, and give without having boundaries. There’s a difference between being kind and letting people take advantage of you. When I think about pure love, I think about Jesus’s sacrifice一 what he gave to us. 

He gave his life.

He gave us the Holy Spirit.

He gave us everlasting life.

Jesus gave.

True sacrifice is always based on giving. You give something up to contribute to something greater. It's a simple concept that’s hard to do, especially when the world constantly shoves egocentric views down our throats.

Giving becomes natural when you know the true source of love is God. It took a while to wrap my head around because I could never (and still don’t) understand why God would give up so much for us.

You may be thinking, “It’s because He loves us duh”, but when you really look at it love paves the way for grace and forgiveness. There’s a reason why love is listed as the first fruit of the spirit. Love is the foundation of all that we do, and it should be the core of your decisions, purpose, and attitude. It’s how you grow in your walk with Christ and in life.

Sometimes it’s hard to love because a lot of us have been hurt and never learned how to love freely.

We’re used to being hypercritical of ourselves and others, imposing expectations on our sisters and brothers, and ignoring all the inner work we need to do to declutter.

This Valentine’s Day, my prayer for you is to learn how to love and be loved in a godly way. 

“Owe nothing to anyone一 except for your obligation to love one another.” Romans 13:8 (NLT)