Would You Like Love If You Saw It?

Love makes us feel good. It’s tender and emotional. …. It’s a mutual thing- you give a little love so that the other person gives you a little love, and we all feel good. 

Love is total acceptance of everything under the sun and verbal praise of everyone no matter what a person is doing to themselves or what they believe is right. That’s modern love.

In our culture love is super easy. It’s an easy thing to do. A loving parent is the parent who just lets their kid live however they want to live. They don’t do anything when their children are bad. They give their children whatever they demand. They ensure their children waste their brains and their entire childhood hooked on screens so that the parent can focus on themselves. In reality, they are completely selfish, but it’s passed off as love. 

This fake love is as easy to spot as a wolf wearing sheep’s clothing. It’s so fake it would never pass for real love to anyone who has ever experienced real love. But I think that sadly, many people have not experienced real love in our culture today. 

Countless children have grown up with incredibly self-centered parents who devoted their lives to their pleasures and careers, but not to their children. Their parents saw their children as a nuisance and a bore. These children were surrounded by friends raised in similar situations, and who were also often raised in broken homes. The schools taught them what to believe and value, and all around them they saw that apparently love is this watery, powerless, selfish thing. And they believed it.  

Real love is sacrifice, and it does whatever is best for the other person. The love we see being paraded about as love is self-love. Self-love is narcissism. It does things to receive back, and doesn’t care about the soul of the other person in the least. If a person is hurting themselves by what they are doing, this fake love turns a blind eye.

Sometimes, if it sees the chance to virtue signal or to feel good about itself, this fake love praises the harmful behavior. Take for example, the mutilation we see happening all around us in transgenderism these days. People praising confused children who have been encouraged to hate their own bodies and want to destroy them, when all these kids need to hear is the truth. They need to hear that they are beautiful as they are and the path that they’re tempted to go down will lead to despair and more confusion. True love would speak the truth at all costs.  

Love is hard work. It’s easy to tell someone they’re wonderful and amazing when they’re clearly corrupt or deceiving themsleves, because that’s what they want to hear. It’s easy to go along with the crowd and have no moral scruples about anything. It’s easy to allow your children to be corrupted by their desires and sinful nature. It’s super, super easy. 

What’s hard is actually doing the loving thing. It is hard work to not be self-seeking. It is incredibly grating on the nerves to be patient. It is difficult to be kind. It is like a kind of death to lay down your pride for someone else. It is hard to do every single thing that St. Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 13 when he describes in detail what love is. 

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, 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. Love never fails.” (1 Cor 13:4-8)

God is love, as St. John says. So that means that God has all the attributes of love in perfect form. His actions show us what love is. When we see stories all the way from Genesis to Revelation of God acting, He is ALWAYS acting in perfect love. So what does that look like? That love is strong, selfless, forgiving, long suffering, and disciplines those who rebel against it for their good (just as we should discipline our children for their good). That love speaks the truth. Many people today view these key aspects of love as things that make people weak or despicable. As a matter of fact, these elements of true love have become deeply hated in our society. That’s why I am so grateful to God that we have the ultimate example of true love to guide us in this world where lies abound, but where the truth sets us free.