The word ‘Love’ has many connotations today.
“Oh, I love that dress!”
“I love the way he sings!’
“I love to dance, or eat pizza, or go shopping!’
On a more serious level, we say we love our spouse, our children, our parents, our friends.
But even deeper than that— what does it mean to love?
Love is an action. It is a choice we make. When we truly love , we do something beyond what we think we’re able to do, or maybe even beyond what we want to do. Yet we do it anyway.
Many times you’ve heard, “Love can change the world.” But we’re not in charge of the larger world, only the world in which we live and that may be a very small world for us—-the world of our family, the place in which we work, or the interaction with the same people we see on a daily basis. So how do we love them?
As Mother Teresa said, “Never let anyone come to you without coming away better and happier.”
There are indeed people in our lives who always seem to make us feel better or happier, and we want to be around them because they are showing us love–a love similar to the love of God.
Some of us who try to develop our relationship with God, find that we are happier, more secure, and even more loving after prayer, remembering that He gave us his son, Jesus, as the ultimate example of how to love.
In this season celebrating Jesus’ birth, we are busy, busy, busy. But let’s take a few minutes to thank God that we have something to be ‘busy’ with—that we have people we care for and people who care for us.
And then, let’s take the further step of also trying to become for those people, an example of how to love when–quite frankly–they are not being very lovable themselves. We may be surprised what that kind of unselfish love can do in our small and personal world.
Translating a World on the Edge 