A Fresh Look At Love

In the lead up to Valentine’s Day, we are bombarded with adverts for restaurants, flowers, cakes and chocolates. Supermarkets aisles are filled with suggestions of foods and recipe cards that will supposedly inspire love. Jewellers are gearing up for their next big sales after the Christmas and new year rush.

Interestingly this is also happening at a time when many will record atrocities rather than intervene to stop injustice, others share videos of people’s mishaps seeing it only as humour rather than putting themselves in the victim’s shoes. Abuse of human rights and dignity has risen to unprecedented levels.

Modern day slavery is a global issue and human trafficking is seen as nothing but a money making venture by the perpetrators.

In many nations of the world, millions are dying and denied basic facilities because of the levels of corruption perpetrated by the powerful.

Other individuals, professionals and countries are also complicit in this as they help to perpetrate the crimes. Stolen monies have to be moved by someone and kept somewhere.

The roles many play in this chain of destruction are not seen to be as sordid as those who actually stole the money but the truth is they are just as bad.

It’s almost as though many people have forgotten how to love their fellow man and treat each other fairly.

So as we approach another Valentine’s Day, I reckon it is time to take a fresh look at love. The way we have defined love doesn’t appear to have cut it.

Many of the people with millions of die hard fans who, daily, profess their love online are also the loneliest.

Can we truly love without knowing the source of love, without seeing each other’s through the eyes of the Creator?

Did the Creator really design you to look down on others, to judge yourself as superior to any other created person?

You weren’t there to design your own DNA or to provide input while others were being created, so how is it possible that you can deem one ‘created person’ better than another ‘created person’.

Regardless of what you believe about how you got here, the fact is that some time and thought must be behind your very existence otherwise your body wouldn’t work with the level of precision we see.

Even as earthly parents do not look at their own children and wish some well and others evil, it is safe to assume that we were all designed to love and be loved.

Our Designer wishes every one of us well and not evil. More importantly we are all equally loved.

It’s up to us to take our cue from that viewpoint and consequently wish one another nothing but good.

One of the passages often quoted at weddings says, “Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.

It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.”

To redefine love and how we treat one another, this passage is a great place to start.

So as we start a new week and celebrate the day the world has set apart to commemorate love, I encourage us to use this opportunity to take a fresh look at love.

Love isn’t just meant for our partners or family, it’s meant to be equally expressed to all of humanity.

I ended last week’s post by reminding us to love our neighbours as ourselves and I can only reach the same conclusion today.

Have a great week and thank you for reading my weekly posts. Please subscribe and share with others.