All You Need Is Love

I love the Beatles.

But some people don't believe in love. They don't think that relationships can be any more than friendship and hooking up. They realize that butterflies in the stomach, passionate embraces and the sinking feeling that you have when you're apart pass. All things pass. The most you can hope for is that the great, optimistic feeling of those heady first days lasts for years instead of months. Unfortunately, the more times you've been around the block, the shorter the block gets.
The more time you've moved along, the easier it is to pack your bags.

The New Book is all about love. There are three Greek words in the New Book defined as "love." The words translate as erotic love, friendship love and perfect love. In God's economy, the most valuable currency is perfect love - patient, kind, forgiving, hoping, believing, caring. Add to that erotic and friendship, and you've got the real deal.

People want to believe in Jesus and love and hope and forever together, but what most have known is brokenness and pain, absent parents and screaming dinners, blended families and midnight weeping.

It's too hard to believe "til death do us part," so when orgasm yields to family, the expectation is serial monogamy. Twelve years of marriage, a couple of kids, then relationships, maybe even a second marriage, but probably not.

The Church should be able to address the broken nature of modern relationships, but the Church suffers divorce as much as the unchurched. There is no power in statements spoken horizontally. Don't tell me what the book says, show me your life.

I say it's real. you say, show me. That's fair enough.