What greater gift can we give than love?

What greater gift can we give than love?

As the bible says: "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things) Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the completeness comes, what is in part disappears." 1 Corinthians 13: 4-10.

I seemed to have lost that outlook on life. And it wasn't until today, that I realized just how close I came to losing it for good. We feel SO smart sometimes, we think we know better than God, we think joy can be achieved through works, through knowledge, we think we can find true joy on our own, but we can't. True joy comes from loving, and being loved. When did we start caring more about knowledge, than we did about each other.

We all want to be loved, accepted, we don't want people trying to change us, we don't want people trying to make decisions for us, what we want is for people to love us, for who we are, and to continue loving us as we grow, mature, change, and to love us even when we go a little 'crazy'. People can't love us that way always, because we all have our failures, we can't depend on them, because they will always fail us, but God is always there, loving us, waiting, patiently for us to realize that no matter how 'crazy' we are, he's not going anywhere.

I really don't know how to love very well, but what I do know is that there are people in my life, that I would drop anything to help out. However, there is a difference between helping and fixing, and it's a fine line. Sometimes in life we need to distance ourselves from people, for their sake. Sometimes we love someone so much that we think that doing everything for them is doing them good, but it's not. It's selfish, because we are not helping that person be the best that they can be.

Sometimes loving someone means letting them go, even if it's the hardest thing you will ever have to do. We have a tendency to depend on the people who we know will do things for us, make things easier on us, but each of us must experience things on our own, and a true friend will stop giving advice, and stop doing things for us and will step back and make us figure it out.

My heart has been heavy all day for two of my friends who are dealing with ailing parents. When we love people, it kills us to watch them suffer, we want to fix it, we want to make the pain go away, but the pain is part of life, it sucks, it's hard, but it's real, and we need to experience it. Of course it hurts when we face losing someone that we love, but we can't stop death, we can't stop life either, and sometimes it means losing someone you love very much because their path has either come to an end, or its weaved in a different direction. BUT don't ever discount the love.

Love is real, and just because we don't see one another every day, or just because we don't talk every week, doesn't mean we don't love each other. We need to give each other room to grow, room to explore, room to discover God, discover his love for us, and sometimes that means we need to fall flat on our faces, but we'll figure it out. This is how God loves us, he sits there patiently, un-interrupting until we ask. Until we realize just how much God loves us, we'll never be able to truly love each other. Love doesn't have expectations because expectations are selfish, and love is not selfish.

Sometimes in life we take the road of the world, the road that thinks joy comes from the right job, money, and people. But true joy comes from love. The two go hand in hand. So in order to find joy, we need to understand what true love is, and unfortunately, our world is really bad at showing us true love.