Americans are just about as ‘loving’ a people as you will find anywhere on the planet. If you doubt this statement just be quiet and listen to the average conversion over lunch at work, school, or home. What you’ll find in our everyday conversation is the word ‘love’ used at an alarming rate of frequency. For example, we love our shoes and all the different styles. We love our clothes and all the favorite stores that sell them. We love our hair and our one of a kind hair stylists\salons. We love our nails, spas, and boutiques. We love our homes and decorating them, the furniture and all the stores that stock the furniture, our art and the antique dealers, our yards, trees, flowers, and gardens and those big stores that sell everything we need to maintain them. We love our cars and favorite dealerships, our motor homes, our motor cycles, campers, boats, 4-wheelers, and anything else that moves with a motor. We also love our electronics and don’t forget the stores that sell them; we love our cell phones, flat screen televisions, computers, stereos, i-pods, i-pads, i-phones, i-tunes and all our other music. We love our food, and don’t forget the 1000’s of different favorite restaurants, our donuts, our chocolate, our pastries, pies, and cakes, oh yeah, and we love our coffee. Most of us also love our country, our churches, our families, friends, our sports, our recreation\vacations, and even our jobs. Let’s face it, we ‘LOVE’ everything, but do we really ‘love’ anything?
Our conversation reveals the term ‘love’ has lost all sense of meaning and definition as we use it for everything, with little to no thought given before it is tritely thrown out. Our fascination with all afore mentioned things reveals that we have little to no concept of the sacredness or the value love holds. Still, the most alarming and saddest fact remains. Not only do we not understand love’s true meaning or it’s genuine worth, but we also have no idea what it looks like or to whom it truly belongs. Case and point: according to business news media outlets February, affectionately known as ‘the month of love,’ home of the Valentine’s holiday posts retail sales receipts of around 14 BILLION dollars annually. This second only to Christmas and often rivals Mother’s day for the 2nd or 3rd biggest retail season of the year. The point is that we think we can somehow buy something that never was or ever will be for sale, ‘love.’
You see, we do not have a clue what real love is because we were all born with a love deficiency which can be imagined as a huge hole in our heart. It is a void incapable of being filled with anything or by anyone other than the One true God who created us. When you come to Him by faith and ask God to fill your broken heart, He will hear your cry and instill His love into you. This is the love of a renewed relationship that was broken between you and God but now has been restored. Only then can you understand what real love is and ready to demonstrate and give true love to others. Jesus put it this way in His Word, the Bible, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Then He said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Our love from Him and our ability to love is a special gift from God, let’s treat it SPECIAL this month as well as all the others.
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