WHAT IS LOVE

Baby don’t hurt me, no more. 

Oh Haddaway, you’re welcome in my head.

But, I’m processing camp. I’ve just come back from an incredible week away, “leading”a bunch of high-schoolers through some thoughts about life and God, the universe and everything. 

taking senior high kyacking.

messy wide game aftermath.

It was an amazing, extraordinary, emotional experience and right now I’m stuck somewhere in the middle of a camp high and the camp blues. Have you ever eaten an entire packet of pods of an empty stomach? It’s kind of like that feeling, so terrible. so worth it.

What does it all mean.

We talked a lot about love.

Being a girls cabin leader - most camps - we talk about love; about hot boys and biceps, broken hearts and double dates. Just my kind of conversation.

But this year, we talked about love. We talked about poverty. We talked about climate change. We talked about cow farts, and letting our pee sit un-flushed in the toilet bowl. We talked about sweat-shops, and op-shops and aph.gov.au. As I said, we talked about love.

“What is love?”

I asked, a great many things? An emotion, a feeling, a party for hormones?

Can a man love with his wife and ignore her? Can a kid love its dog and kick it in the face? Parents love their children and I love mini-wheat cereal. Perhaps then there are types and sub-categories.

1 John 3:16 (what is it with those John 3:16’s variations!)

 ^“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for others.”

What does it mean, practically, actually – if love is not so much a feeling as an action, a sacrificial action, and we love our neighbor as ourselves?

And now for a sentence as opposed to a question. The choices we make on a day to day basis can be cruel, selfish and unloving, with or without us knowing about it (or caring about it). For example, the clothes that we purchase, who made them? Where do they come from? Is the shirt I’m wearing produced by an over-worked and under-paid child? The answer is probably, maybe. Do I care about that.

Under what conditions is the food that we buy produced? Transported?

Does the amount of resources that I use – power, electricity, etc – mean that others around the world have to go without?

That is not loving. That is not sacrificial. That is selfish, the way of the world.

My heart has been tying ends together these past few days, it’s formed a bit of a fur ball – and this is what I’m coughing up:

Love is sacrificial action, epitomized in Jesus Christ.

Loving Christ is loving others.

Making informed choices about what I wear, how much power I use, what I choose to eat and how I effect the environment – directly effects the lives and living conditions of other people, and the distribution of goods around the world.

Being wise in these areas therefore is a part of loving others, and loving Christ. It’s sacrificial action. It’s love.

Loving Others. Loving Christ.

For in the end and after all:

“The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.”

(Galatians 5:6b)

I want that tattooed on my heart.

Amen.