Love: A Necessity
Reflecting God’s Image by Loving Others
In Don Miller’s book, Blue Like Jazz, he creates a comic strip about an astronaut who gets lost in space. The astronaut’s purpose was to work on the space station, but the station blew up; so he was stuck in his life-giving space suit, orbiting the earth fourteen times a day. He was closed off from all society for fifty-three years, and “he died with hardly a spark for a soul.” This man’s name was Don Astronaut. Don Astronaut didn’t experience love for fifty-three years of his life, and therefore, he became a “shell.” C.S. Lewis explains in his book, The Four Loves, that “[i]f you want to make sure of keeping [your heart] intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.” He goes on to say that when you put away all love from your heart, “[i]t will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.” Because Don Astronaut’s heart was closed off, although not necessarily on purpose, his heart became brittle. One of my peers at Sterling College, Bryanna Moncada, noted that when we close ourselves off from love, as Don Astronaut did, not only is romantic love stopped, but friendship love is stopped as well.
I grew up listening to a song called “Made to Love” by the popular Christian artist TobyMac. In the song Toby concludes that he was made to love God, and that loving was the “passion [he] could live for” and the “flame that made [him] feel more.” I believe that everyone was “made to love,” and if someone goes through his life without giving love, they have not experienced a certain joy that comes from it.
I think I can confidently say that, over the course of my life, I have experienced the four types of love. I have experienced romantic love; the excitement of a “crush,” the getting to know someone, the hope of the future with him, and the heartbreak that occurs when it ends. I have experienced the love of friendship; the willingness to be there for someone when he needs it most and to help him walk through the mountains and valleys of his life. I have experienced the love of a mother and father; the love that consistently “wants what’s best for me” and wants me to become “the best version of myself.” I have experienced (and am currently experiencing) the love of God. In a song called “The Inheritance,” Graham Cooke explains that “you will always be the beloved.” He says that God’s love will never change, but that “what will change, says the Lord, is [my] ability to receive His love.” God’s love is constant, but I want my ability to receive his love to grow more and more as I get older.
1 John 4:8 says, “[t]he one who does not love does not know God, for God is love,” and 1 John 4:19 says, “[w]e love, because He first loved us.” What Miller, Lewis, TobyMac, Cooke, and myself would all agree on is this: everyone needs love. When we experience love from God, as 1 John 4:19 says, we want to spread love to those around us. Sometimes that manifests itself in the form of parental, friendship, or romantic love, but regardless of form, it will always manifest itself when we truly understand the love of God. Because “God is love,” through our loving others, we are a reflection of God and His plan for the world. As 1 Corinthians 13 encourages, may our love be unselfish, patient, and kind. If there is ever a question of what our love should look like in person-to-person relationships, may we look to the God of the Bible to find the answer.
