The other kind of love
Ah, February. The month commonly associated with love because of Valentine’s Day.
The stores flood with food, flowers, and apparel in various shades of red, pink, and chocolate. Oddly, I think it fills more of us with dread than delight: singles feel conspicuous in a culture focused on couples, and those in relationships feel the pressure to meet a social standard for expressing affection—both financially and emotionally.
As Americans, I think we’ve become too focused on romantic love. Perhaps even our church culture has become too myopic about it as well? Affinity groups for couples… sermons on marriage… and more. Please don’t mistake me, if we are married, we should absolutely fortify those relationships through whatever resources we have. Yet an overemphasis on couple-hood creates undue pain for our single friends and—perhaps more importantly—distorts our view of the Body.
Has romantic love eclipsed our view of sacrificial love? Even if it hasn’t eclipsed it entirely, I think we could benefit from shifting our focus more toward the sacrificial. (After all, doing so could only enhance any romantic love we happen to enjoy.) The Bible has many descriptions of romantic love but I’ve struggled to find many prescriptions for romantic love in the Scriptures.
By contrast, there are an abundance of passages that do prescribe sacrificial love for one another. In fact, loving one another is the mark of the Christian:
“Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.”
John 13:34,35 The Message
The Message puts that in starkly understandable, contemporary language—albeit not a direct translation. It’s worth reading how other translations render verse 35.
I’m not sure how well we’re doing with this, friends. Our love for one another may not be lost, but certainly isn’t as visible when we are divided by so much these days. I, for one, want to do better. At church and in the larger community.
May I suggest this February, as a way to orient ourselves to the greater love, when we see any visible reminder of Valentine’s Day—in a store, in décor, or on the calendar—we at least pause right then to pray for God to cultivate His agape love in us. And then let’s look around to see how we might bring His love to whatever place and situation we happen to be in. Perhaps we can even find a way to remind ourselves without a visible cue, bringing it into our professional interactions, friendships and neighborhoods (yes, even to that curmudgeonly neighbor), and family relationships.
May we make His glory known in doing so.