UNSELFISH LOVE

“God is love. This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”  (1 John 4:8b-10 NIV)

John says, “God is love,” not “Love is God.” Our world, with its shallow and selfish view of love, have turned these words around and contaminated our understanding of love. The world thinks that love is what makes a person feel good and that it is all right to sacrifice moral principles and others’ rights in order to obtain such “love.” But that isn’t real love, it is the exact opposite -- selfishness. And God is not that kind of “love.” Real love is like God, who is holy, just, and perfect. If we truly know God, we will love as He does. 

-- From the “Life Application Study Bible”

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THE PAIN OF GRIEF

“O’ Lord have mercy on me in my anguish. My eyes are red from weeping; my health is broken from sorrow.”  (Psalm 31:9)

Real grief is not healed by time.... If time does anything, it deepens our grief.  The longer we live, the more fully we become aware of who she/he was for us, and the more intimately we experience what their love meant to us.  Real, deep love is, as you know, very unobtrusive, seemingly easy and obvious, and so present that we take it for granted.  Therefore, it is often only in retrospect - or better, in memory - that we fully realize its power and depth.  Yes, indeed, love often makes itself visible in pain. 

-- Henri Nouwen

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THE THOUSAND-PIECE PUZZLE

Why am I a thousand-piece puzzle when everyone else is already put together?… Who am I now? Who am I, now that my loved one has died? …

All I seem to see are the scattered pieces of my life cast before me on the card table, waiting for me to pick them up and make the picture. But what picture do all these pieces form? I used to think I knew. I used to know who I was and where I was going and how I was going to get there. But now… I can't even remember where the puzzle begins and I end….

Am I still a mother if there is no child to tuck in at night? Am I still a dad if there is no one to loan the car keys to? Am I still a wife if there is no one to snuggle up to in my bed? Am I still a husband if there is no one waiting at home for me at the end of the day? Am I still a sister or brother if there is no one to tease? Am I still a child if my parent has died? Am I still a human being, capable of loving and being loved, if the one person I loved more than anything has become frozen in time? Who am I now that my loved one has died?…

Keep turning the puzzle pieces over. But don't keep trying to put them back into the same picture. That picture is gone. There is a new picture to be made of those scattered pieces. Search for that scene. Search for the new you... search for the new person you are becoming…

There is joy in living… if we allow time… to reassemble the thousand-piece puzzle.

-- Darcie D. Sims in TCF Salt Lake City January/February 2001 Newsletter


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