Article April 15, 1985 Issue

No lost love

ELAINE R. FOLLIS

Lost love. It's a theme that seems to pervade human experience—at least if the media are any indication. Best-selling novels are written about it. Movies fill a wide screen with its attendant trials and miseries, while television series shrink them to living room size and dispense them on a daily basis. The lyrics of popular songs, set to catchy rhythms, drive the message home: love is pain; love is frustration; love is the most unpredictable and unreliable quality ever known. Why anyone would want to get involved with love is almost a mystery if we judge it simply by its media image.

And that is precisely the point. That media image is based on a case of mistaken identity. True love involves none of those unhappy characteristics, for true love is spiritual. It is an unalloyed blessing. It is indestructible. True love expresses the very nature of God.

But what, you may ask, does "spiritual" love have to do with my present, very human experience? The answer is, everything. Spiritual love, the love that is of God, is not hypothetical and abstract. It is what lies behind every genuine manifestation of that quality which people call love. There is no love apart from God. The author of First John wrote, "Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love."^{I John 4:7, 8.} Clearly, then, the best way to understand the love of God is to express that love, to participate in love, to be loving. Nothing vague and abstract about that!