‘Love is patient, love is kind…’ Blah. Blah Blah. Yah, it’s absolutely true…but do the people that quote it at every wedding really buy in to the actually gritty truth of love?

Love is hard. Love is pain. Love is loss. Love is your heart being taken out of your chest, stomped on and put back inside.

And.

Love is beautiful. Love is sacred. Love is loyal. Love is sacrifice.

Love is hard to explain.

People make such a big deal out of ‘love.’ But lately I’ve found they are overusing the word. And I’m guilty of it, too. I LOVE this book. I LOVE this music. I LOVE this friendship.

Has our overuse of the word love taken the truth out of it?

Jesus didn’t overuse the word love, he meant it. Crazy, die-on-the-cross meant it.

I asked a student what she thought the word love meant yesterday. She said, ‘That you would die for someone.’ My response? ‘Okay, have you really thought out what dying for someone means?’ Her response? ‘Not really.’

We don’t give a lot of thought to the words we use. But we should. They can be hateful. They can be accusing. They can be sarcastic. (Guilty.) They can be loving. They can be compassionate. Actually, you can say one thing, and then the tone it is said in makes it heard in a completely different way than what you meant.

Love can make your heart expand a million times bigger than your chest. I have experienced the blessing of that in Russia with the kids I have connected with in the orphanages we’ve worked with. I actually wrote about it over a year ago in ‘reminiscing’ talking about the first person I really fell in love with, warning…it’s long. Check it out if you haven’t, because it easily fits my definition of love.

How do you define love? What do you use it for?

Jesus said love God, love others. But how many days out of the week do we actually accomplish that for him?

I believe love does conquer all, but if I believe that I should probably stop saying I love dumplings…because I’m pretty sure dumplings don’t conquer all.