Minute of Exercise on Love

Our answer to the query:  How do I feel love acting in my life?

 
... God first loved us.  (1John 4:19) I loved you even before I formed you.  I have put you here on earth to love.  I will take out your hearts of stone and give you hearts of love.

God was and is the originator, the author, of love.  The power of God's love for us pulls us back together when we are broken, overcomes anger, opens forgiveness, and lets in the sunshine.  God's love is felt sustaining us in difficult times, such as rough spots in marriage and caring for a spouse with Alzheimer's Disease. We are moved from selfishness to selflessness. God's love opens the way to love others, even when they do not seem to be loving us as they used to.

Little children show their love openly and let themselves be loved.  Do we let ourselves be loved, or do we run away from love into tasks?  We cannot run away from God's love, but we can and sometimes do bolt the door when God knocks. There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear. (1John 4:18) If we acknowledge to God our fear and our inability to love, God blesses us with love. Sometimes even when we will not receive love and cannot recognize it within us, God's unrecognized love moves us to acts of love.  We may not see until later that we have been and are loving.

God's love for us has a different quality from the love that we as human beings feel for each other - a power and strength and purity that we cannot create.  Occasionally God allows us to experience loving as God loves, pouring divine love through one of us to another.

The opposite of human love is indifference. Passion may hinder love, for love goes beyond passion.

We say God is Love, and God gives us love, and things happen because of God's love. I'm struck sometimes by the experience of God's love for other individuals. I  now wonder what it is about that Love that's different from what I suppose is human love.

I love individuals with human love: grandchild, daughter, mother,  husband. But these seem like my doing. They're fine like I Cor 13. But the love I feel when God brings it to me directly has more life and power and is not of my doing. Has nothing to do with the qualities of the person it just sort of comes. 

I imagine that that's how God loves us with power and strength and patience that as human beings we cannot do as ourselves.

- recorded by Ann Armstrong