To define love.

A friend recently texted me asking me, how I would define "love"? She also asked me, what does love mean to you? I sat there for awhile thinking over what she had asked me and as I sat there, memory upon memory of the appearance or presentation of love in my life came to mind. A hundred scenes had passed before my mind's eye before I had even gathered my thoughts in preparation for answering her question.

I recalled the hands of love that carried me when I was a child, playing on the sands of my island paradise. I looked back and saw the love that was carried on the winds of discipline and rebuke. I heard love call my name as I remembered the day of my baptism and the various mission trips and retreats that followed.

Thus gathering my thoughts, this is what I wrote:

What is love but the essence of purity enacted in such form as that which is tangible to the human heart, bearable to the human soul and present in the truest appearance of any emotion created by as failing a creation as mankind himself. Born of such roots as shallow masks of
smiles and hollow riddles of love poems scratched into paper and made permanent by the ink that put it there, love is diminished and its meaning so degraded that love's precious name should not even be put on as such a label as those who do not truly know it, would place it.
For such love as that, is not love at all but merely lust justified by "love's" pure name. True love is all things unattainable by man's futile efforts. It is above us. It is held but not understood in its fullest nature.

Love in all its beauty is more than the surface of a hug or the victory completion of five months of maintaining a relationship with the person you've chosen to "be with" as your high school sweet heart. It's deeper than anything anyone could ever imagine. It's greater than the chasm that it's absence creates. It's greater than the void of its own departure. Its greater than life and even in death, love is the victor.

So what does love mean to me? Love is the relationships I had, but then lost. Love is desperation I felt when my closest friends slipped away and disappeared into the night. Love is mother who raised me, who gave me her passion, her persistence, her patience. Love is the father who protected me, who taught me what it means to give when you have
nothing, to provide even if it means giving up all you have so that another might gain. Love is the friend who showed me the grace of forgiveness. Love is the teacher who taught me the discipline and consequences of wrong from right. Love is the reason, I am who I am,
for had love not shown its face in a manager hundreds of years ago, or had love not shed its blood that I might live, then I would not be here. For love, true love, in all its mystery and wonders, is the sole testimony that gives me life.