True Love is Alive
What is love? A child would call it “mom and dad”. A teenager would call it “that warm, fuzzy feeling”. Most adults would call it “sex”.But Christians call it “Jesus Christ”. I remember once when I was at winter camp in 2009, I was in a relationship comparable to a bipolar monkey trying to get through the day. Up at camp, they would teach us a new worship song and play it all the time, and this camp’s song was “True Love” by Phil Wickham. On the second day of camp, this boy and I were already on our fourth or fifth fight, this one in particular for no reason. I think it was something like I wanted some space and he took offense to that and began to act like a baby, and I in turn got mad at that. I remember this one day, we went to chapel after breakfast, where we’d had a fight and he’d had to stay and clean up. I went to chapel alone and saved him a seat, but my head was spinning. “What’s happening to us?” I thought, “Why do we fight so much? I thought we were in love!”. I thought back to about eight months earlier when we’d had a discussion about how impossible to be for us to fight because we were so crazy about each other. And now, here we were, fighting on and off like a couple of children. When he finally came in and took his spot, I was still mad. I wouldn’t talk to him, I wouldn’t look at him, I wouldn’t even stand up with everyone else at worship. And then I heard that song. I’d heard it so many times in the last two days, and I personally didn’t really like it. It was too repetitive, not very catchy. But then I tuned into the words. Being a lovestruck idiot, I heard no lyrics from that song other than, “the day that true love died, the day that true love died”. Those words resonated in my head until I felt tears burning my eyes. I felt as if true love died that day, the “love” I’d had with that boy was no longer of any worth. I had no idea what true love was. And if I’d paid any attention to the song, I’d know “true love” was referring to Jesus. It wasn’t until after that relationship ended that I realized the true impact of that song. Jesus died a graphic bloody death for me, a girl who didn’t even pay attention to His songs. It’s now my favorite worship song but unfortunately, they only sing it at Easter time now. It’s an every day of the year type of song, something that serves to remind us every day that Jesus is love and He died for us all. True love is not a teenage relationship. I honestly don’t know the meaning of love if it’s not Jesus. The guy with whom I’m currently in a relationship refuses to tell me he loves me. And I couldn’t love that more. He loves God more than he loves me, and standing where I am now, having gone through what I’ve gone through, I wouldn’t have it any other way. God needs to be the center of any relationship if it’s ever going to come close to love. We love the person we spend the rest of our lives with. Some people weave in and out of relationships and marriages and never in their lifetime experience true love. But true love never dies. Jesus rose again, He is alive! Love is not completely dead, even though our society is slowly trying to exterminate it. Love and lust are too commonly mistaken, so many people fall in and out of “love”. What they’re really falling in and out of is sin. We are to love nobody on this earth more than we love the God who created everything, if we do, if we put any person or thing in our hearts above God, we do not know love. If we cannot tell God every single day that we love Him, tell me why we’d waste that precious word on someone who will die one day? Someone who didn’t die so we could go to heaven, so we could be spared everlasting torture. How could we tell a person how much we love them, when we can’t even hold a love towards our Wonderful Creator? If this is true in our lives, we do not have a full understanding of love. And I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t. But I think I may be starting to.
