The authenticity of love

Hello 2013.

It's been a while, but here's a thought.

This year I wish to challenge myself into what it really means to understand, not the soppy kind of romantic love that we always just think of when we see hearts or look ahead to that day we call VALENTINES ;)

No. I mean, our love in the true authentic meaning of it. Loving ourselves, loving life, loving God, having love for people, our friends, partners, family, the poor, loving our hobbies or our pets, I guess what I mean is underatnduing the in's and out's of our hearts and what is meant by "Being in love with LOVE". It needs to be more than a word or a song lyric or a feeling or passing emotion, it needs to be a state of being, a movement, a lifestyle.

I've recently decided to do some theologial reserch on the term LOVE. I think to some people the word is overused and perhaps even lossed it's meaning. To others, maybe its misundertood or even used against each other. To many it is a complex thing term that they don't know what to do with. But to those who get to feel it, experience it, a zeal for love in life it becomes quite simple...

1 Corinthians 13:3-13

³ If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,^[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

⁸ Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. ¹¹ When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. ¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

peace x