“Whats love got to do with it?”

Last night I was reminded by someone of how long it has been since I last posted to my blog. I haven’t had a whole lot on my mind that would make a full blog post, maybe a paragraph here or there, but nothing really worth mentioning. Well……..that’s with the exception of the one huge thing that my human mind cannot let go of…….Love. I mean it’s amazing how many things will make you think about it. It even came to mind last night during our youth ministry. We had a lesson on overcoming the fear of failure. The kid on the video had been wanting to talk to a girl and couldn’t muster up the courage to do it. It made me think of that Jodeci song “Come and Talk to Me” (hope some of you got that reference). Haha anyways, it reminded me of all the fear that goes into relationships. The fear that she (or he) won’t like you……I’m not good enough for her, or the fear that the object of your love is going to let you down, that it will fail. The point was the fact that you can’t fail if you don’t try, and if you don’t try you can’t succeed; therefore you must do.

I think maybe I’ve been a little confused about what love actually is. I used to think that love was more of just a feeling. You know the way you feel about someone or in some cases something. That overwhelming feeling of joy that overtakes your body, that feeling of excitement that you get from head to toe that makes you want to do back flips. But recently I’ve been reminded that Love is actually more than just a feeling, it’s actually a verb. It’s an action, something you do…that is driven by emotion. It’s not just about an emotion that you get; it’s about that emotion that you have and then that Love that you do, that Love that you give.

In May of this year I made the decision to put my “love life” on hold. An idea that was hard to comprehend but that had been confirmed by God. Funny thing is that I think I had a misunderstanding of what I was actually putting on hold. I was putting dating….finding a spouse on hold, but I was not at all putting love on hold. Love is not just about that 'someone' that you decide to spend the rest of your life with or that someone that you wake up to every morning or even just that someone that you take out on a date. Love is about doing and if I was ever going to find someone to fill in the above I was going to have to learn how to “do” Love.

I recently read a book by Bob Goff called Love Does. If you haven’t read it, then you should. It is a very inspiring book about his life and how God’s love for him (us) translated into him pursuing (Loving) the things that God put on his heart. He turned the emotion of Love into actions that have ultimately altered the shape and direction of his life, all as God had intended. It helped me understand the difference between just living with a feeling in your heart, and actually using that feeling in your heart to drive and motivate you. To motivate you to act and make those God sent desires into a reality, ones that you can live out every day. For some reason though, it comes way too easy for us as humans to feel something and just sit back and bask in the rays of that wonderful feeling. Not realizing that the longer we just sit there the more likely that feeling is to go away. It’s kind of like one of those emergency flashlights with the crank, you know from the “as seen on TV” aisle, if you don’t turn the crank every once in a while……..you’re going to lose the light.  Love is no different. You have to act on it, you have to work at it, you have to turn the crank every once in a while and recharge that battery, otherwise that Love will fade and you will lose it.

It reminds me a lot of the relationship that we are called to have with Jesus Christ. If we don’t work on that relationship it’s easy to lose the fire, it’s easy to fall back in love with our earthly desires and slip away from the relationship that we have with Him. This was a reminder that I found way to close this last month. I was sick for like 2 or 3 weeks straight. I was worn out and wanted to do nothing but sleep and sit around on my butt. I continued to do my bible reading plans, but because of the way I felt my time alone with him slowly started to dwindle. I was no longer talking to him about how I felt and probably because of how I felt I definitely wasn’t praising him. Even when I prayed with my children at night I was just going through the motions so that I could hurry up and get to bed. By the second week I was starting to question things, things that I hadn’t questioned in a long time. Was he really there for me? Was he really willing to answer my prayers? What I realized was that as I was sick I was trying to just bask in his light, instead of seek him out and turn that crank to recharge the battery. I wasn’t doing Love, I was just sitting there hoping that He would do it for me. Not only that, but as I forgot that I had to seek Him out and work at Love, I also forgot that everything he does is in his time…….not mine. Luckily, for me and my relationship, I have some very wonderful people in my life, people that reminded me of how Love works.

Hopefully this will be a reminder to someone that each and every relationship, each and every Love, takes work. It takes dedication. If you Love something, or someone……go for it. None of us can afford to stand around basking in the rays. We have to work for the things we want. So crank that handle and charge that battery……make Love an action.