| What is love? If you’ve hummed that Haddaway song once in the past few weeks, better stop reading, you haven’t got a lot of time left anyway. Definition of love…dang, this could be really deep. So deep that even if I wrote something very deep I wouldn’t even know it. You might not either. Love has amazing depth, it’s the most memorable thing ever. Just typing that makes my mind swim with things I’d enjoy writing about…such as long nice kisses, awesome metaphors, lessons about how beautiful, powerful, and delicate of a thing love is. Just thinking about all that puts a smile between my ears and encourages me to think really hard about what loves means. On the other hand, love is simple. When put into action it’s not graceful, elegant, or dreamy. It’s infrequent, clumsy, hardly acknowledged, impossible by some standards, unspoken, and misunderstood. Love is so often talked about but so rarely do we allow ourselves to practice displaying love. We like just to write columns about it and add words to the ever-growing description of the deepest and simplest word in the English language. Will this bit of writing whet your imagination, challenge you, or satisfy the smirk already on your face? Who knows. So we’ve established the two poles of how we usually define love...one is dreamlike and deep, the other is simple (and possibly profound). That being said I feel like I can actually start defining love. You’re thinking, how is love seen as ugly, why is it unspoken, how is it misunderstood? Well, we’ll get there. The first thing to realize is that love is so much different than we think or would like to think. Unfortunately (actually fortunately), love isn’t defined by a song, column, movie, or that last Mountain Dew hidden behind the jar of pickles. So often we’re indirectly been told, “This is love! This is love!” Try to erase everything you’ve ever thought for a second. Look at the last sentence, laugh, and keep reading. We’ll start with this: imagine yourself and another person growing up together on a desert island. How would you define love in that situation? For me love would be climbing up a palm tree and getting a coconut for the other person, just for the heck of it. I said this would be simple and I didn’t lie. Okay, now we’ll apply this…Love is sacrifice. When you “love” in this sense, you choose to admit that something is more important or greater than yourself. By this definition, not many have loved. Desire is different than love, love is the furthest thing from desire. Love is not “want.” It’s completely unselfish, it desires absolutely nothing in return. Love is helping another person out when they are in need, and never asking for restitution. By this definition, not many seem to deserve love. Even in my own experience, it’s so rare that I’ll let someone borrow even something as small as a CD without wanting it back within a few weeks. Love is taking unplanned time and energy out of your schedule to do a favor. Love is caring. Love isn’t words, it’s listening. Maybe I should just “listen” for 5 minutes instead of asking you to read the rest of this. Holy crap, and I thought this was the simple paragraph. This paragraph proves to me that love isn’t a simple word when defined, but it certainly can be in practice. Love is most certainly a choice, not some sort of feeling. So often we confuse the two and that can cause huge problems. Okay, but I know you don’t dream about holding the door open for old ladies on your lunch break. We are fascinated by the depth of romantic love and love in general. It’s everywhere. One would almost think people like to love and be loved. Hmm. What do you dream about? I dream about being married, I dream about being in love with the same person for the rest of my life. Is this love? Honestly, I don’t know. The world would probably say yes, this is love, you have defined love. But no, I haven’t. Dreams are dreams. I dream about a lot of things, and most of them cannot be summarized as “sacrificial unplanned random love.” Well, maybe random love. Nevermind, Courtney Cox Arquette Figgins. Darn it. What I’m trying to say is that all the “feelings” and all that crap have been around for a long time, but it’s not the cornerstone of what love is. What’s the cornerstone? Well, I’d be happy to talk to you about all that at another time. Ahem…God, Jesus Christ, died on cross, forgiven of sins, can live by grace with joy, meaningful existence, eternal life, must…tell…others… Whoa, had to clear my throat, that’s all. Like I said, love is a choice. But to be loved, that’s not a choice. Examples found in simple and theological arenas, I don’t feel like being bothered by Nick any more than I already will be. Conclusions…love being concise and simple? I guess not. All I have done by writing this is gained a giant headache from trying to put a bunch of sentences together that define something that most of the time seems impossible to define. And no, it doesn’t amount to climbing up a tree for a coconut. Love seems so complicated to me, mostly because I have to sift through all the ridiculous crap I’ve ever been told is love…it all goes so far beyond that. Something else I’ve found in the past is that I’m so undeserving of love in general, if not from specific sources. True love reaches as far as the east is from the west. Yeah, not something I even want to expound upon. What’s written is written, what’s done is done. Love is there, it’s in places you never thought, places you might never go unless you put something ahead of yourself, places you’ve heard of, places you haven’t. Love is not a desire, an afterthought, a false hope, or a ham sandwich. Love is constant, love is forgiving, love understands, love is enduring. Love never fails.
   
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