Love.

Love.

The one reason people die for and the same reason people live for.

One powerful thing, aye?

 Love in the noun form, as a thing, is a passion, an emotion for someone and something that gives pleasant feelings, fuzziness, comfort, security and hope. Love is something precious, something worth fighting for, something worth protecting, something worth keeping. Humans need it, humans struggle about it, poets write about it, poets try to describe it.. and it goes on and on, everything about love.

I believe everyone knows and understand Love in the noun form. In the sonnets, love is described to be perfect, to last long, some doesn’t last long, some gets threatened by death or time, some beautiful, some fierce and strong... But to love in the verb form?

 Modern songs sing about catching a grenade for love, jump in front of a train for love, old movies talk about taking the moon for the beloved, novels and movies show love being so happy, so flowery, to jump into bed together... what about love in our normal day to day basis? What about the simple essence of love?

I believe that to love is to sacrifice ourselves for the other, to commit to the other and work things out, always seeking to honour the other, never to belittle or hurt the other. To love is to help the other to get better, support the other, never let the other walk down the path of ruin. To love is to speak the truth in love, with gentleness, always respecting the other and always caring for the other’s feelings. To love is sometimes to be hard in a proper way on the other so that the other will grow stronger, be wiser. To love is to be kind, to encourage and never bring down, always seeking to uplift the other, patient in dealing with the faults of the other, persistently believing in the other and rejoices in the other’s winnings.

 To love is to not do things that will hurt the other (you know, having affair, lying, shouting, abuse and etc.) but always seeking to protect the other, to build the other.

But of course we are all imperfect humans and we have our faults. To strive for perfect love would indeed be quite impossible by human means. But we can all work at it, to do our best to love.

 In the Christian context, God is love and all are summoned and greatly encouraged to love each other. The whole bible is all about God’s love which involves encouragement, punishment, giving gifts and the most ultimate one is sacrifice. A short excerpt of a passage about love can be found here.

 Love can build and break a person. Love can drive a person to live and also to death. So when one truly finds love no matter how perfect it is, do appreciate it. As for the rest of us, perhaps we are to seek to extend love to others and others will respond too in love as in this world full of broken people, many are too broken to be able to extend any love. So, love.

Written by Dorothy Ting Siao Wei on March 31, 2011. All copyrights reserved.