What Is Love?

     Like Haddaway before me, I pose a question to you today: what is love? 

     I’ve been working on a book that plunges into that question. Several characters have differences in what this word or feeling actually is, and this causes some conflict between them. So today, I ask you: what do you think love is? 

     One character believes that love is nothing more than a trick of the brain and hormones. It’s purely biological and not something to be trusted in. 

     One character believes that love is what develops over time, trust and choosing to pick this person again and again.

     And yet another one has an overly romanticized version of love, caught up in the feelings of being twitterpated at the first blush of hope. 

     And what is love? Is love emotional? Is love logical? 

     I’ll (hopefully) write at least a second bit to delve deeper into this subject, but today, I want to pose a question: since God is love...then what is God? How can we relate this complicated feeling of love to Him? 

     Is being a Christian a focus on the emotional aspect of Christianity, or do we need to focus more on the logical side? 

     I’ll put it like this. In any sort of a relationship, you will probably not have that first blush, head-over-heels feeling all your life. Even if you have it most of the time (kudos to you if you do), there will be moments when you just...don’t. 

     Are you any less married because of this?

     And as a Christian, you will not always have an “emotional” connection with God. You will not always feel enamored or even His presence. You will not always have that “mountaintop experience” that a lot of people live for. 

     Are you any less a Christian because of this? 

     I don’t want to negate the importance of these emotional moments, but I do want to point out that putting too much emphasis on the emotional is never good. In a relationship, if you do this, then the first time you lose “that loving feeling,” you may decide to call it quits. You may declare that you have “fallen out of love” with someone, and begin to search for someone else that will give you that feeling again and for longer, all in a relentless search for “true love.” 

     In the same way, if you go through a rough patch with God, or if you suddenly don’t feel that rush, or whatever Great Emotional Experience you were looking for with God, you may decide to call it quits. You may think that He’s not real, that you’re “so far apart” from Him, or that He’s abandoned you if you don’t continually get these grand, sweeping emotions. You may even keep on searching for a religion or something that will give you “that Godly feeling” time after time. 

     In both scenarios, you will probably be continually disappointed. 

     Then there’s also the fact that, like the first character I mentioned, people will always try and discount emotional experiences. 

     It’s hard to trust your emotions. The heart, above all things, is deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9). We are often warned to not make big decisions solely by using it, but to taper it with a bit of logic. Not to mention that it’s very shaky ground to try and measure “God’s will” with how we feel about something. For example, you may say: “if I’m happy about this, then I know it’s God’s will.” Well, some morally iffy things can make you very happy, if you ask me, and saying “God, make me happy if this is Your will” can also lead you to some tricky ground. You may experience a burst of happiness only to realize that it was your own doing, not anything God did. 

     Emotional experiences can also create false expectations for people. “I knew I was in love with my future spouse from the moment I met him/her!” can be just as devastating to someone as “I knew God was real when I had this Great Emotional Experience with him!” While both may be true, they set up a problem: A) That only if you have a Great Emotional Experience is your love true, and B) that every journey or story is going to be just like yours. 

     And, finally, people may be more liable to discount emotions as just “something in your brain.”  The first character I mentioned (no spoilers!) is convinced that love is just something that occurs in our brain, a concoction of hormones and emotions that make us “feel” something. Truth be told, I’ve met several people that feel like that, because they can’t reconcile the science of love with the soul of love. So to try and convince someone of the existence of God solely based on your emotional experiences will probably not convince them. “I’ve felt God!” for them, translates to something like: “you’ve had the same pseudo-religious experience that people in every single religion have ever felt.” 

     Which is also true—people in other religions also seemingly have these Great Emotional Experiences...so how, if we are a Christian solely because of the emotions that we’ve felt, can we say that we are any different than everyone else? 

     Which brings us to the infusion of logic. 

     Just like a spouse must choose to love their significant other based on many factors, so we must also choose to love God. We are Christians because we must choose to be Christians, day after day. Each morning when we wake up, with every heartbeat, our actions must say: “I choose to follow Christ.” We must rationally look at what it means to be a follower of Christ and decide if it is worth it. Though the emotional route may be “flashier,” it is the subtle logic of Christianity that will carry us through. 

     Consider the Parable of the Sower: in Matthew 13, Jesus says that part of the people who fall away will do so “when trouble or persecution come.” If we are just going by emotional responses, trouble comes when we are presented with anything that counteracts our own feelings. Oh, people in other religions have Great Emotional Experiences as well? How does this fit into my life? I’m not having any Great Emotional Experiences lately? Am I not a Christian anymore? Well, I’m just not “feeling” it with Christianity anymore, so I’m just going to give up and move on. 

     Just as we should not choose our life partners based on how we “feel” about them at any given moment, we should not choose our religion based on what we “feel,” either. 

     So, does that mean that there is no place for emotionality in religion? 

     Well, is there no place for emotionality in love? 

     Just as there is a time and place for everything, there is a time and place for emotions. If we are just solely logical in all our doings, we’re missing the heart of Christianity. If we’re solely emotional in all our doings, we’re missing the head of Christianity. It’s kind of like the message of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility: we’ll only end up hurting ourselves if we rely too much on sense (intelligence) or sensibility (emotion). It’s only when we blend these two things together will we ever find anything true and lasting. We must find a way to embrace both of them, building a firm foundation for our faith which won’t be shaken when we find something that might challenge our faith on either side.

     One of my favorite songs of the moment goes like this: “I’m still a believer...I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try.” 

     As believers, we will always face trials. Actually, as humans we will face trials. And we can sometimes be envious of people whose faith seems “natural,” who continually have these Great Emotional Experiences when we continually...do not. But that’s when we have to “try, try, try.” That’s when we have to not give up, to face the next day and say: “I still believe. I’m still trying. God, don’t give up on me yet.” You may go through rough patches spiritually, where it feels like nothing is going your way, when it seems like God is a thousand miles away. But we can’t be like those in the Parable of the Sower that fall away at trouble. We must pick ourselves up and “try, try, try.” Even when it hurts. Even if our heart deceives us and tells us that there’s no use. We must use our mind to persevere, to set our souls to cling to Jesus. 

     Another song I know says this: “I can sniff/I can see/And I can count up pretty high/But these faculties aren’t getting me any closer to the sky/But my heart of faith keeps pounding so I know I’m doing fine/But sometimes finding you/Is just like trying to/Smell the color nine” (Chris Rice, Smell the Color 9). Sometimes it can be discouraging when we feel no Great Emotional Experience, or if we’ve never had one. Sometimes it can seem nearly impossible to “find” God, to know what He wants, or to listen to His Voice—yes, just as impossible as smelling a color (especially the color nine). But as long as we “try, try, try,” and don’t let our heart of faith get cold, then we know we’ll be doing just fine. 

     So, what is love? 

     And what is God? 

     The answer will come to us, as long as we keep on choosing to love, to believe, every single day.