Love is filled with emotion, but it’s our choice to love that reveals the ocean within our souls where love never ends.
Perhaps at first, love is simply an emotion.
All those things we crave, passion, desire, excitement, and that feeling of falling. And although those things are wonderful, they aren’t enough to sustain love. Not on their own.
There comes a time when love requires us to make a choice. We have to choose to stay. No matter how hard it becomes. No matter how much is demanded of us, we have to choose it.
That’s when forgiveness, respect, trust, compromise, and grace, the things that truly sustain love are planted. And every time we choose love, they are nurtured and they grow.
The enduring message in 1 Corinthians 13 is that as Christians, we are called to love one another as Christ loves us. Jesus’s love for us is everlasting, merciful, humble, and kind. Above all, it is not self-serving. Christ exemplified His unconditional, perfect, love by assuming the sins of mankind and suffering death on a cross. In rising from the dead, He opened the gates of eternity to all who believe. That is the greatest love story ever told.
For love to endure it cannot remain on the surface where it started, it has to move deeper.
Too many of us give up when the surface becomes murky and the waves start to rise. We head for the shore, letting go too soon. Long before we’ve had a chance to discover that unconditional love lives and breathes in the depths, not in the shallows.
Yes, love is filled with emotion, but it’s only through our choice to love that we reveal the ocean within our souls where love never ends.
Everytime we choose love, we move closer to fulfilling Christ’s purpose for us, not just in our marriages, but in all our relationships. Living and loving as Christ loves us spills over into every area of our lives. Choosing to love others, no matter the circumstance, whether we think they are deserving or not, is exactly the way God loves us. How can we do any less?
When I say I love you, it’s not the words,
but our connection that anchors them.
The life we’ve breathed into them.
The miracles shared because of them.
These words hold the entirety of us.
The certainty of everything we are
and the promise of everything we’ve yet be.
JN Fenwick (© 2017-2023) | mothjournal14