Some People Want To Fill the World With Silly Love Blogs

You shall love the Lord your God. That is the greatest command. Jesus said so. The silver medal mandate, he added, is to love others. Get those two right and everything else falls into place. He said love is what drives obedience, marks a disciple and identifies us as children of God. And he’s not the only one to put love on a pedestal. Paul celebrated faith and hope, but the crowning virtue, he said, is love.

You don’t need a theology degree, though, to appreciate the importance of love. On this point, even John Lennon agreed with Jesus – love is all you need. Every other flick out of Hollywood is a love story. Love is the hallmark of the Hallmark channel (and in the title of, like, 67% of its movies). It even has its own musical genre – love songs.

With this landslide of agreement, you’d think we would be swimming in a sea of love; that there would be so much love in the world we’d be all out of chocolate covered candy hearts to give away. But we’re not. Whether you take your morning coffee with The Drudge Report or The Huffington Post, or wind down at night with Fox News or MSNBC, it’s clear there’s just not enough love in the world. Apparently, we’ve been looking for it in all the wrong places – shacks, pick-up truck tailgates in corn fields, the back seats of ’60 Chevys, elevators, tunnels, battlefields, bars and chapels.

It’s not that we don’t appreciate the power of love or revel in the glory of love. And even Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, knows that money can’t buy you love. We’re practically addicted to love. It’s our favorite drug, the potion we seek to sooth our souls. The world may be full of silly love songs, but it’s also full of violence, deception, fear and hatred. So where is the love?

(For fun but not profit, there are 20 references to love songs in the previous two paragraphs. My undying admiration if you can identify them all.)

My sense is that we either don’t know what love really is or, if we do, we’re not sure we want it. That sounds a little harsh, so let me unpack it. When we talk about love, we usually start with what it’s going to do for us. Or where we can find it. Or why we aren’t getting enough of it. Feeling loved has climbed from the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the top of the pyramid. So for many, love is not about what they give, but about what they receive. In fact, if they don’t feel like you love them – or if the love you give doesn’t make them feel what they expected to feel – they withhold love from you. That pretty much worms out the heart of commands like “love your enemies.”

But love isn’t first about me. In 1 Corinthians 13, which is the Bible’s zip file on the subject, Paul leaves little room for a me-centered definition of love. “Love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud . . . it is not self-seeking.” There’s a scene in the old Jim Carrey/Morgan Freeman/Jennifer Anniston movie, Bruce Almighty, where Bruce tries to use his newly bequeathed divine power to force his girlfriend, aptly named Grace, to love him. To be honest, I get that way sometimes. I know I don’t have divine power, but I use what I have to try and win or cajole or even force others to make me feel loved.

I know how I do it. And I bet if you think about it, you can see the places in your life where your own definition and practice of love starts with you instead of others. We should work on that.

Another possible explanation for this famine of love, however, is that we know precisely what love is – we just don’t want it. I know love requires humility. But I like to be first in line, to be thought of as exceptional, to be recognized for all the awesomeness that is me. I know love means patience. But I want what I want and I want it an hour ago. And everybody knows love means showing kindness. So why isn’t there a line of people out my door waiting to do me a good deed?

Since we know genuine love makes demands on us, we settle for substitutes. For example, sex; the real kind with another living human being or, increasingly popular these days, the virtual variety. Talk about making love out of nothing at all! Instead of deep friendships, we stay in the digital shallows of social media. Or we settle for transactional, rather than transformative, relationships by stringing together a series of experiences that temporarily fill a void the way a diet of carbs makes you feel full. For about an hour.

It makes sense why Jesus said everything hangs on those two commands – loving God and loving others. If I can humbly move myself out of the way and actively pursue those priorities that matter most to God; if I can look to the interests of others as intensely as I do my own, then all the other commands in the Bible become, not obstacles standing in my way, but a pathway to a real place all those silly love songs can only imagine.