Where is the Love???

Most of my weekdays start around 5am and usually end after midnight.  I start my days making sure that my kids are prepped and ready for the day, have had some type of meaningful communication and fellowship with God and then ensuring that they are delivered safely to their respective “drop zones”, so that the “cheddar buses” can transport them to school.  The rest of my day is filled with the usual tasks like work, splitting (dinner, kid transportation, kid activities...etc.)  responsibilities with my wife and completing the countless other tasks that a couple with an active teenage daughter and teenage son are required to handle.  I look for opportunities to help others along the way, coach youth football, serve in my local church and minister to both family and friends along the way.

By human standards, I’m a “good dude”…good husband…good father…good child of God, so why do I find myself at times feeling empty and taken for granted after doing so many “good things”?

I Corinthians 13:1-3 MSG) reads:

“If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.”

No matter what “good” I do, if I don’t do what I do out of a heart of love or from a compulsion, a deep urging, to release love, then not only are my actions empty, energy consuming  and meaningless but I’m literally “nothing”.  I’m nothing without love.  What a sobering statement!  I can be doing what appears on the surface to be significant and influential tasks for the Kingdom of God, within my community and even in my house, but those things are shallow at best if love isn’t the primary driver.  Only what I do for God and to serve others as provoked by love will last. 

It is definitely time for a perspective and a procedural shift!

No longer can I just do “good” things with love, in the back of my mind or as an afterthought.  I have to cover my thoughts and actions in love.  Love must saturate my being so much that “self” will have no room to set up camp.  I must choose to love before I actually engage in the loving deed.  Love must precede me before I take action, cover me while I’m acting and be the sweet residue that remains after my task is complete. 

Love adds meaning to life.  To love is to live!  

Are you tired of “loving” in vain? Are you tired of feeling empty after you have “served” or “loved“ others?  Why not begin to make your daily tasks more purposeful and pleasing to God by transforming them into acts of worship and honor to Him by saturating them in love.  Plan to love!  Do all that you do because of love and watch your life take on new meaning and your interactions become more meaningful.  You will only begin to live when you begin to practice a lifestyle of love! Are you ready for love?

Be Blessed,

B