Love is...

With Valentine's day coming up, love is in the air. And in case you haven't yet caught a whif, it smells of converstion hearts and carnations.If you ask 100 different people on 100 different days what love is, I'm fairly confident that you'll receive a different answer each time. To Pat Benetar, love is a battlefield but to the Backstreet Boys, it's kisses in a bean bag chair. To six year old Krissy, love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs. Kim Casali even created a comic strip in the 1960s called "Love is..." to give a daily defition of the little things that add up to the complexity we can't quite seem to figure out.

Love has always been important to me. As someone who wears her heart on her sleeve, you can pretty much tell how I feel about someone. Which can be just as bad as it is good and is therefore something I'm constantly working on. But I think it's important for love to be expressed. True, it's a precious thing that should be protected and used properly, not thrown about as a shell of words that hold no meaning, but genuine feelings are important to express. So important, in fact, that my family has created our own word for ending phone conversations with each other. "Iloveyoubye" has become one jumbled word in Mockler-speak. On more than one occassion when talking to my mother I've accidentally shortened it to just a goodbye and then felt the the need to call her back and make sure I said "I love you." I was never exactly sure what it was that made me call back (partly a fear of something happening to a family member before we spoke again, which is a different thought for another day) but it was just a feeling that something wasn't right.

Maybe it's because of Valentine's Day. Maybe it's because Peter and I are going through the book "A Severe Mercy" by Sheldon Vanauken and it's all about the relationship between him and his true love. Maybe it's because I've been trying to check myself and see if I'm really being loving to people I come across in my day to day. But I've been thinking a lot about love. And I think I've figured out why it's so important to me.

Love breaks a boundary. It opens a door. The expression of love, for me, is the beginning of a new level in a relationship. And not merely in the romantic sense. It's my way of telling Peter that not only do I care about him, but I'm willing to put his needs before my own. It's my way of telling a friend that I love her so she'll see the amazing, fun person she is when she can't see it herself. It's telling my mom after a fight that it doesn't matter if she didn't say what I wanted to hear or if she hurt my feelings because I love her and I'm ready to move past that. It's telling a child that no matter how they've been treated at home, I love them and with me, they are safe. It's telling a new friend that not only was it great to have lunch with her, but that I really do desire getting to know her heart because even if we just met, I love her as Jesus does. Expressing love opens so many doors...to trust, to building a stronger relationship, to genuine sharing of each other's lives, almost to endless possibilities.

Granted, it also opens up the door to hurt because you have to be vulnerable enough to let someone in to really know you. Still, as many times as I've been hurt by loving others - in both dating relationships and friendships - I've never held back in telling someone that I love them as soon as I realize it to be true. I know there are people that would disagree with my "overuse" of the phrase but Jesus called us to be known by our love and when people realize they're important, that they matter enough for me to reach out and genuinely accept them, before I really even know who they are, that's my expression of love. And by holding back and not telling people how we feel, I think it does a disservice to the potential of a relationship and it also prevents what God can do in us and through us.

I'm not giving a definition of love because even if I did I'd probably change it again in a few days. I just know that I want give it away as much as I possibly can. Because I've been in that place where I was behind a wall, giving just enough to appear like I was trying but without actually having to love, in order to protect myself from not having my heart broken again. And unfortunately, I can't say that I won't ever be in that same position again. But I know that days like today...encouraging a friend, sharing lunch with people I love so much, even those that I'm just getting to know...are so much better. A life of vulnerability, loving those around me, giving of myself as much as I can to as many people as I can, is so much better than trying to keep something in. Everyone wants to be loved. So why not fulfill that need in a friend by making sure they know that they are? Maybe that's part of what love is.

I know there's a lot more to it. Feel free to leave your thoughts and definitions.