Some years ago, my father gave me a set of metric socket wrenches that were useful for working on my imported car. My mother gave me a sturdy overcoat that kept me warm and protected during the cold winter months. My parents gave these gifts with genuine love and affection.

Although many years have passed since that time, there was a message behind those gifts that has continued to bless me. The gifts have helped me define true love. My father's loving gift was practical and useful. Having my car in good running order gave me a sense of freedom and self-government and opened up new opportunities to serve others. My mother's loving gift was comforting. It not only shielded me from harsh breezes and chills; it was an orderly provision for my daily living.

The gifts suggest to me that real love is both progressive and protecting, challenging and cherishing. They remind me that love meets our needs in very practical ways. Like the coat, love provides one with a steady, gentle embrace. And like the tools, love helps one to move forward and break through limitation.

The tools and the coat were useless unless I took them out and used them. Similarly, love is only an abstraction if we fail to use or express it in our relationships with others. "Love is not something put upon a shelf, to be taken down on rare occasions with sugar-tongs and laid on a rose-leaf," Mrs. Eddy writes. "I make strong demands on love, call for active witnesses to prove it, and noble sacrifices and grand achievements as its results." And she continues later in the same paragraph, "Love cannot be a mere abstraction, or goodness without activity and power." ^{Miscellaneous Writings, p. 250.}

When we express true love to another, we are expressing more than a human emotion. Love is practical, useful, active. It may appear to begin in the human heart as an emotion, but the Bible helps us trace love to its only source. The New Testament teaches us that "love is of God." ^{I John 4:7.}

Since love is of God, it is not formed by humanity nor limited to human definitions. It has only the nature that God gives to it. Love is the supreme gift.

Can we purchase this gift? Christian Science explains that since God is Himself divine Love, He has created love as a constant element of our identity, not an occasional emotion subject to human circumstances. God's love is already central to our true being. Christian Science further asserts that love's opposites—such as hatred, self-centeredness, and impatience—are not native to man's being.

Each day we can detect evidence that love is natural to our true being. Any time we feel a surge of unselfishness or forgiveness, we are glimpsing the love that is innate in man. Our God-given love becomes apparent to us when we feel compassion and caring, or appreciation and joy. But glimpsing the presence of love need not be an occasional happening. At every moment we can recognize that God eternally fills us with a deep and selfless love for all that is right and good.

Yet if we are fully to understand this greatest of all gifts, we must consider the quality of God's love for His offspring. God loves, nurtures, protects, and supplies man. God is never unloving to His children; so there is never a need for us to feel unloved. God is forever fathering and mothering us.

In human experience we find that God's Father-love equips us with the spiritual tools to progress and avoid repeated detours into sin and sickness. God's Mother-love blesses us with a warm, protecting coat of kindness, which shields us from frigid blasts of hatred and injustice. It is because of God's love to us that we are able to feel love, live love, and give love. The love that God gives to man is ours to express to family members, church members, friends, and even casual acquaintances.

Like most people, I have had many occasions to stop expressing hatred and start expressing love. One incident has stood out to me for several years. During final examinations in college, I gave a document to an across-town printing company for some three hundred reproductions. They agreed to have them ready for me in three days.

I called the company on the third day to be sure the document was ready and that someone would be available to receive my payment. My examinations were such that I needed to budget my time carefully for study every waking minute. The manager of the company assured me that the document was ready and that she would be there to receive my payment.

When I arrived at the copy store, the manager was gone, but the assistant kindly helped me. She had seen my completed document just an hour earlier. But now it was nowhere to be found. We searched through every corner and drawer in the entire store. The assistant assured me that the manager would return in just a few minutes, so I sat down to wait. After about twenty minutes of waiting, I was very angry. I felt my study time was being wasted. When another twenty minutes passed, I was "steaming mad." I was determined to give the manager a difficult time when she returned.

At the summit of my fury, a quiet thought came to me: What about love? I remembered that since I was actually a child of God, love was an inescapable element of my being—an element that I need never ignore. I realized that God was providing me with the ability to live love regardless of the circumstances. My temperature started to descend! Frustration, criticism, and anger gently drained out of my consciousness. It seemed only natural to live this feeling of love, so I started helping the assistant collate ten large stacks of papers that she was preparing for another customer. Just then the manager came in the door. I felt only love toward her.

(Let me say here that what I remember most about this experience is not the subsequent events, which happily resolved the situation, but my conscious choice to express love even when all the evidence seemed to justify resentment or animosity. The process of embracing the immortal, Christly thought of love and rejecting the mortal temptation to hate has been the long-term blessing from this experience.)

When the manager arrived, she explained that an employee had become ill and that she had driven him home in heavy traffic. She was on an errand of kindness. Out of respect for my document, she had placed it in her private, locked drawer. Only she had keys to it. She sincerely apologized for detaining me and said, as she handed me the document, "You've been the nicest customer we've ever had; I want you to accept our work as a gift for your kindness." At first I refused, since the printing cost was to be over thirty dollars, but then I realized this gesture was part of the action of God's love. I left the store with a warm conviction of God's tender closeness, and this served to uplift and improve my approach to the final examinations.

Our loving Master, Christ Jesus, lived a life of forgiveness, compassion, and unselfishness. He explained that even "sinners" loved those who loved them. And he defined a higher requirement of true love: doing "good to them which hate you." ^{Luke 6:27, 32.}

We all yearn for this genuine Christly understanding of love. But today the word "love" is under heavy attack. Bumper stickers, romantic novels, and television programs indiscriminately misuse and cheapen the word "love." Aimless human conversation and thinking may tend to minimize our reverence for the quality of love.

But we can identify and resist this tendency to secularize that which is of God. We can recall that love is to be treasured as a holy and worthy gift of God, made manifest in each of us. We can respect and protect our sense of love just as we do our sense of integrity or intelligence.

It is the carnal mind that would downgrade our understanding of love. But God, infinite Mind, is giving each the wisdom to cherish and respect true love. Mind creates us with the discernment to determine what is truly love and what only masquerades as love. The more we learn what love is, the more we know what it isn't. Divine Mind reveals to us that excessive personal attachment is not love. Selfishness and sensuality are not love. Nor is any kind of fear a part of love. Disobedience, intemperance, and impatience have nothing to do with pure affection.

Love is what God continually gives to man. And it is the affection that we naturally express for our creator and our fellowman. Love is eternal, included in our God-given being. It is the gift each of us longs to receive, and the gift that each of us must share.