Our culture is confused about love.
Certainly there’s no shortage of references to the concept. We sing about love, read about love, and dream about love. We search for it (often in all the wrong places), celebrate when we find it, and grieve when we lose it. One of the biggest holidays of the year commemorates our apparent obsession with love. Christmas centers on toys and Easter prompts new clothing, but Valentine’s Day is all about love–and chocolate, or possibly a love of chocolate.
Maybe that’s the problem–we use the word so much that it’s almost become meaningless. Someone once said that the difference between a friend and a lover is that when a friend says, “I love you,” you understand precisely what he means. I love chocolate, I love my wife, and I love the Yankees, not necessarily in that order and hopefully not in the same way.
The ancient Greeks used three different words that we translate as “love.” Eros connoted erotic love, the wonderfully confusing, ooey-gooey feeling that seems to appear and vanish with the wind. Philos described familial love. The distinction clarifies how I love my brother, though I’m still not sure where chocolate fits.
But the word used in the Bible for “love” is agape. This depicts self-sacrificial love, the kind of love that’s a choice rather than a feeling or an obligation. When I claim that Relentless Grace is about LOVE, this is the sort of love I’m describing.
Agape is the love that radiates outward from its source. As anyone who’s ever “been in love” knows, eros contains no organized pattern. Erotic love is a chaotic, intense crashing of waves that toss us in a dozen directions simultaneously. Philos is no less confusing, because families include a variety of confusing, conflicting dynamics. We love our families, but few of us would characterize them as a neatly organized series of concentric circles.
Agape is love born of a conscious decision to care for another. Agape involves giving, not receiving. Agape tosses a stone into the pond without knowing with absolute certainty where the ripples will travel. Agape is a way of living, a faith that this sort of love always works for eventual good.
Relentless Grace is a story of agape. The characters loved an unloveable person; their unselfish kindness still ripples across the surface of my life.
“Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)
Question: What are your thoughts about the distinction between love as a feeling and love as a choice?
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Ready and willing to solder together you guys.
Comment devenir riche
Judah, one of the 12 tribes of Israel, descended from Judah, who was the fourth son born to Jacob and his first wife, Leah. It is disputed whether the name Judah was originally that of the tribe or the territory it occupied and which was transposed from which.
|After the Israelites took possession of the Promised Land, each was assigned a section of land by Joshua, who had replaced Moses as leader after the latter’s death. The tribe of Judah settled in the region south of Jerusalem and in time became the most powerful and most important tribe. Not only did it produce the great kings David and Solomon but also, it was prophesied, the Messiah would come from among its members. Modern Jews, moreover, trace their lineage to the tribes of Judah and Benjamin (absorbed by Judah) or to the tribe, or group, of clans of religious functionaries known as Levites. This situation was brought about by the Assyrian conquest of the Kingdom of Israel in 721 bc, which led to the partial dispersion of the 10 northern tribes and their gradual assimilation by other peoples. (Legends thus refer to them as the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.)|The southern Kingdom of Judah thrived until 587/586 bc, when it was overrun by the Babylonians, who carried off many of the inhabitants into exile. When the Persians conquered Babylonia in 538 bc, Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to return to their homeland, where they soon set to work to replace the magnificent Temple of Jerusalem that the Babylonians had destroyed. The history of the Jews from that time forward is predominantly the history of the tribe of Judah.
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