To Cherish and To Hold

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Finding a very precise definition for the word ‘love’ is something most of us struggle with, even though most of us have some intuitive understanding of the concept of love. On this day where people all around the world celebrate the “Day of Love,” let us take a fresh perspective on the definition of love.

There is a beautiful description of love that we come across in these lines,

These beautiful lines are from the Bible. They tell us that love is not just a feeling, but a lot more; it is a decision, an act of the will. It is a resolve to cherish and to hold the loved one, even on their worst days, when they don’t seem very loveable. But this sort of radical love is not something that we can simply derive from within us. Such unselfish and consistent love – the love that loves our neighbour as much as we love ourselves – is not natural; it is supernatural, which is why it needs to come from God Himself. We cannot display this love without first experiencing God’s love for us because He is the true epitome and the real definition of love.

God’s love, as displayed in the Bible, is not dependent on the loveliness or lovableness of humanity. God, in fact, decided to enter the mess of our world and our lives, which had desperately strayed away from Him and His purpose, for the sake of love. He came to this world and took the form of a man called Jesus, just to communicate that love to each one of us, in language that we could understand. He lived an ordinary life of depicting love and even went to the extent of dying on the cross to restore the relationship between Him and us.

All of this may not make complete sense on the surface of it to many of us who are reading this, but here’s the bottom-line: God loves each one of us intensely as His children and longs to have a relationship with us. Just as the taste of the pudding is in the eating, the true taste of this love is in the experiencing of this relationship. So would you want to enter into a relationship with Jesus today?