Love Is All You Need

This morning at church, the theme for the service was love. (Here are the sermon notes, and an MP3 file will be posted there soon.) Several times during the service, we split ourselves into small groups of 2 - 4 people. We discussed the opening questions, related our own stories, read passages from the Bible, shared communion and prayed together.

There are three types of love that are usually described: agape, phileo and eros. Agape is usually described as unconditional love with no expectations of anything in return. Phileo is brotherly love, like the city of Philadelphia, and this is a mutual thing. Eros is the root word for erotica and represents romantic love.

This past week, I was talking with my dad about the word agape. Even in this google link, it's usually described as the kind of love that Christians are supposed to have for all humanity. My dad was making the point, and it was reiterated during the Sunday service, that love is a verb. Love is an action. We have to do something about it.

We don't actually have agape love for Joe Schmo from Idaho if we have never met them. We may have warm and friendly feelings towards strangers in general but we can only say that we love them when we do something for/with them. In fact, the only person that can love everyone in the world is God since he sent his son Jesus to die for each of us. God also demonstrates his love for everyone of us regularly in tangible ways every day, which then leaves the question of how we respond.

That's the setup and explanation. The most important part of this service, for me, was the first discussion that we had together in our groups. One girl related that she has always fought with her parents and she moved out of her home in her mid-teens. Even phone calls that she made after that point would quickly devolve into arguments and hurt feelings, and something as simple as saying "I love you" was incredibly difficult for either her or her parents. She said that she has been praying about it for the past six years and it's only recently that they have been able to have normal phone calls and express those three little words to each other.

Another girl in our group talked in vague terms about an experience that she had three months ago when a close friend of hers betrayed her trust in a severe way. She said that while this wasn't a "forgive and forget" type of thing, she at least has worked through what it means to truly forgive her friend. She said that forgiveness is easy for minor things like arguments or rude behaviour from your friends. It's when you face something serious, something that you don't want to forgive, that you really test what the term means and then you get a better understanding of what God has done for us.

In response to the first girl, I related my experience with my brother. We had a lot of animosity between us throughout our teenage years. I was the goody-two-shoes elder son and during that time, I continually snubbed my brother and placed myself on a pedestal. It took ten years for us to work through it and it was only in our mid-twenties that we really dealt with those feelings and that history and became friends. I expressed this story to the girl to show her that it is possible to restore family relationships and things can work out in her life.

In response to the second girl, I swallowed hard and told her about how I was the one that had broken the trust of my own friends. One act of indiscretion on my part and I blew apart years of friendship. I explained that I had been on the other side of her kind of story and it took me and my friend about a year to deal with it and restore that bond. Forgiveness was one issue but rebuilding trust was another thing altogether.

Our group discussion was only about five minutes long and we each related only the barest of details. Even so, they said that they saw God working in their own lives in each of these situations, working out what love really means. I also feel like sharing my own experiences allowed them to see the big picture and have some hope about where their relationships were going. For such a brief discussion, we each seem to have gotten something meaningful out of it.

To quote the Beatles: "Love is all you need." Is that true? Maybe, but it depends on what you mean by the word "love."