And Now a Word on Love

I have had a few tough experiences recently with expressing unconditional love. Oh, I don't mean that it's been hard to have unconditional love. For love - any sort of love - can only come from God. Because God is love (scripture says that and I believe it). I just mean it's been hard to express it. Regardless, it's made me camp on the idea of unconditional love. And it's God's covenant with us that He loves us no matter what.

I was reminded of this in a wonderful article by Paige Benton Brown. I will quote her here because I couldn't really say it any better:

The only time folks talk about human covenants is in premarital counseling. How anemic. If our God is a covenantal God then all of our relationships are covenantal. he gospel is not about how much I love God (I typically love him very little); it is about how much God loves me. My relationships are not about how much friends should love me, they are about how much I get to love them. No single should ever expect relational impoverishment by virtue of being single. We should covenant to love people--to initiate, to serve, to commit.

It is out of this love that I can love. And only out of this love. And it is a "cosmic impossibility" that He can love any other way. It should be for me also.

I want to leave you with Sonnet 116 - by William Shakespeare. Obviously, he speaks of marriage, but I look at it as covenental love:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

All for now,
Lisa