Cultivating a Love That Makes All Things New Again

When I was in college, I had the amazing opportunity to live in Brazil for three months. Even now (ahem!) many years later, I can still easily conjure up memories of smiling faces, soft breezes, and laughter over a steaming hot bowl of feijoada (Brazilian stew). The Brazilian people have one of the warmest, most relationship-driven cultures on earth. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that they have a much more nuanced way of communicating love and affection for each other. But it took a while for my very American mind to grasp that Brazilians don’t casually throw around the word love like we do.
 
For example, they reserve the phrase, “I love you,” almost exclusively for romantic love. Here in America, we move easily and non-distinctly between saying “I love In-N-Out burgers,” to “I love my spouse.” A Brazilian would shake her head and try to coax us into being more careful and tender with that phrase. Even within the realm of romantic love, Brazilians have at least a dozen common, but distinct phrases to express the type and stage of romantic love.
 
The ancient Greeks also had multiple word variations for love, all of which would come in handy to have in the English language today. Some languages have up to 96 words to describe different facets of love. When I read about them, I almost become ashamed of how generic the notion of love is in our everyday vernacular. Like the Brazilians, the ancient Greeks believed that it was important to uniquely recognize the other kinds of love, each of which are distinctly valuable for everyday life. In fact, in Greek myth, the concept of romantic love – eros – comes from a form of “madness” brought about by one of Cupid’s arrows. I think this is particularly insightful, since eros is something that can drive us mad at different points in life. When we have it, we feel exhilarated and driven, sometimes at the expense of logic. And when we don’t have it, we seem to be willing to sacrifice all other kinds of love to get it. It can drive us mad to obtain it, stir crazy if we lose it, and unrealistic about keeping it alive.
 
The other Greek words for love include philia (friendship love), storge (familial love), agape (highest, altruistically-driven or divine love), ludus (flirtatious love), pragma (practical love), and philautia (self-love). Of course, each of these have healthy (pure) and dangerous (sinful) versions, but almost all of them have a role in every life at some point in time.
 
In 1 Corinthians 13, the famous “love chapter” of the Bible, the apostle Paul gives a list of amazing acts of faith, and he concludes with, “but the greatest of these is love.” And you guessed it, he used the Greek word agape to indicate the kind of love he was championing as the best. I find it ironic that this chapter in the Bible is commonly used at weddings (it was in mine!), but that most of us don’t have any idea what Paul is really saying by using the word agape instead of eros, philia, storge or even pragma. Yes, of course, he means that God loves us far more than we can imagine and that we should show that kind of self-less love to others. But there’s even more to his meaning, and it will revolutionize your perspective on all the other types of love. Getting a hold of Paul’s deeper meaning, believing it, and putting into practice, can literally transform every act of love you do from this point forward. Whether faded, lifeless, old, boring, frustrating, or twisted, agape love has the power to make any other type of love new again.
 
To communicate Paul’s deeper meaning, I’m going to quote a movie. I know that may seem irreverent, but sometimes the best way to grasp Biblical principles is through culturally-relevant analogies and stories. That’s why Jesus told so many parables. So here goes. In the movie Dan In Real Life, one of the characters is a teen boy who longs to spend time with his new girlfriend, despite the miles and difficulties between them. When confronted by her father who tells the boy that what he feels is only infatuation, he calmly states with conviction, “love is not a feeling. It is an ability.”
 
This is what Paul is talking about here. Despite anything we face in life… the trials, the joys, seemingly insurmountable odds, stubborn obstacles, the highs of great success … true love is not a feeling, but the ability to love in any circumstance and through any storm. It is a deeply-rooted belief that God’s sacrifice for us makes it possible to love Him back, despite our incredibly flawed humanness. It’s an unwavering faith that when we seek to love Him completely without ambition or agenda, He will, in turn, pour that love back into us. God’s love for us is so pure, so perfect and so enabling, that through Him we have the ability to extend love, grace and selfless behavior to anyone. His love is life-giving, purifying and restoring to all the other types of love. Through Him, we can do all things by His strength according to Philippians 4:13. Outside of His kind of love, our acts of love may have temporary impact, but they will always fall short in one way or another.
 
To bring this all home for Valentines Day, let’s go back to romantic love – eros. No matter where you are today – madly in love, wishing you could find love, desperately wanting to rekindle a faded love, or grieving over love lost – a deeply rooted and applied love for God can transform, purify, enhance, or redeem any of those situations. Like the roses in the picture above, He specializes in making us new (and everything we do) over and over again. In Him you will find abilities you never had. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” 2 Corinthians 5:17
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