What love Really Means

JJ Heller sings the song What Love Really Means.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgGUKWiw7Wk&list=PLA9E99F394BF5B85D&index=36
 That is a pretty good question. I know that it probably means a lot of different things to different people. It means different things if you are male or female. It made me start wondering one morning what it meant to me and really what came to mind was not a definition. It was a series of images. It meant crying where Sharon could not see me after I had just heard for the first time that the diagnosis was cancer. Sitting in an examining room while tears ran down my face knowing that our innocence was gone forever, knowing that we had three small boys who needed their mother. 

 It meant being unable to eat breakfast on the day they did the second bone marrow biopsy, and not having eaten for close to 24 hours almost fainting while holding her hand as you hear that awful sound of a needle puncturing into a pelvic bone. It meant years later being blindsided by the fact that what you thought was going to be a short easy treatment in a morning, leaves you sitting in a waiting room as she is in surgery having a pic line put in so they can actually run all of her blood through a machine to clean out the IGMs over several days, and crying in public again for the you do not know how many-th time. It means watching them put mouse proteins in the IV and then seeing the reaction of violent nausea that follows and keeping a hold on your emotions because you are needed to be there to hold her hand.

 It means every time the tests come back from the blood work, you want to know the results and yet the fear of looking at them is almost too great to bear, as though you are jumping from an airplane and you are not sure if the parachute will open this time. It means reading the results and sometimes just trying to breathe as you look for any redeeming interpretation on those tests.

So is love born out of pain? Not really, sometimes it is the fear of loss that brings the realization of love. It is the knowledge that your life and happiness is tied up in the companionship and relationship with another that shows you love.

 I was listening to a radio minister this morning. I usually try not to make the mistake of listening to this guy. He is not familiar with the phrase “I don’t know”. This morning in the first minute of his sermon he mentioned the “Wrath of God” 7 times. That was when I shut him off before I started to yell at the radio, because yelling at the radio is really not arguing a point, but an exercise in futility. I know a lot of “conservative Christians” have a love of the phrase the “wrath of God”. It is used in the Bible, but most often when God’s wrath is mentioned it is because humans have been treating other humans badly, and by badly I mean torture and murder, or neglecting the needs of other humans, such as letting them starve or be homeless. These are the times God says my wrath is kindled against them. So in my humble opinion, if you want to talk about the wrath of God, first look at your life and see if you are doing the sort of things that will bring God’s wrath down on you. You see to me the cross is not a symbol of the wrath of God it is a symbol of the love of God born in pain. Pain from when we rejected God and decided to go our own way, pain from when we decided death was a more palatable alternative than loving God. Pain from when Jesus said, Father if there is any other way to do this, I would prefer it but if it is your will, I will do it (sorry my paraphrase there). God in the person of Jesus died on that cross and was separated from the presence of God, because that was the only way God could get us to love him again in a just manner. It was the only way God could take away the choice man made to die, and give him eternal life once more.

Yea, love seen through pain.