Anything Less Than Love Is Not From God

Love people.

It’s simple, but it’s not easy.

There is not a greater calling in life or a better goal to aim for. It is the greatest commandment, included in the same breath as “Love God.” There is no more divine call, no moment in life more divine than when you give your love away.

That’s a thought: you and I are most like God, most bearing his image when we love. He is slow to anger and quick to love, and we are prone towards the exact opposite. So as we choose love to rule our lives down to the most minute detail, we become mirrors of the divine.

What better way to make earth look more like heaven than to love. Not simply because love rules the heavens and sustains the cosmos (which He does), but because of the effect love has upon people, relationships, and societies as a whole. Drawing the best out of people can be attempted by berating and scolding them, but I think we know that love and encouragement holds far more power to unleash the potential of a soul than cynicism and criticism.

As people are loved, they operate out of safety. It’s funny, safety doesn’t equate to complacency, which I think some overbearing fathers and mothers fear and therefore push their children far further than they should. Safety actually does just the opposite. It creates a platform from which to spring into the full expression of our gifts and goodness. Fear cripples creativity, while love unleashes it. Love thus retains the potential to improve the world around us and allows our God-given glory to shine. I say “retains” because it is dormant until we pick it up, make it our own, and give it away.

Love is exhausting, because parts of our heart must be involved in the process of loving, and parts of our heart are given away as we give our love to others. They now possess something of you and are free to do what they want with it. This incredibly vulnerable and generous piece of yourself is at the mercy of another, many others if we are living life well, and you no longer have say in how it is treated and cared for. This would lead to a fatigue, burnout, and total depletion of life and love were it not for God’s perfect love for us, which never let’s our well run dry, and the love that others are giving us.

This giving of love must include receiving in order to reach its full expression. We cannot experience the full scope of love and its transformative power by only giving love away. We must receive love as well. And just as we give a piece of ourselves away as we love, so too we receive pieces of others when they love us. We are slowly but surely becoming the sum of all of the loves in our hearts, if we choose to be that is.

We can choose to be filled with things besides love: lust and physicality, anger and gossip, aggression and malice. That is what we can give away and, if that is the chosen path, what we will receive. We will have no capacity for love if we only extend hate. All of these things will accumulate in our hearts and we will be different people, shaped by everything we choose to let into our hearts and give away from there. Hate will breed hate, while love will fuel abundant life.

Love people. It’s not rocket science, but it feels equally as hard to execute. Settling for anything less as the standard for your life will be an absolute waste.