Love is all around

I'm surrounded by love. No seriously. I mean, I know that in the movie "Love Actually" we hear Hugh Grant saying that "love actually" is everywhere and does exist, all you have to do is look for it.
So if love can be found everywhere, shouldn't I be happy and enamored right now? But for some reason I'm not. I think that the definition of love is so vague and overgeneralized. Most people will accept the difference between an "I love you" and an "I love ice cream." But I think that too many times we jump to the "I love you" without really understanding love. There's got to be something more to it than a description of how we feel about our favorite foods and a phrase that is tossed about so easily.
At a concert of his, Chris Rice asked the audience why Christian artists don't usually sing love songs, since they have the greatest example of love out there. That really struck me, because it seemed so obvious to me. If God is Love, then you can't have love without God, and how are you really able to understand love without at least trying to understand God. Of course, I would be naive and silly to think I could actually understand God with all the limitations of the human mind, but at least faith is a gift given so that we can grasp a tiny bit of Him. Yes, believers are called to spread the love, "Jesus loves you" we hear all the time, and its so easy to just spout off the verses and "proof" that God loves the whole world, but shouldn't it go deeper? If Jesus loved to the point of death even his enemies, is that what love is all about? Death? That doesn't seem right.
What is so liberating about love? Pop culture seems to have a grasp of this when the love songs on the radio say that they didn't know life or the fullness of it before they found love, and so many movies encourage to forget the rules and the sensibleness and just follow your heart into love. In the Christian community, I hear people swear that they didn't know the fullness of life before their faith gave them a new way of looking at it. They were now open to love, so life opened up. I think that there's something lacking in the generally accepted love in the love songs and romantic movies. Not that they don't have it all wrong, it just seems that they don't have it all there. Love is not just a gut feeling, but a way of life. A choice you make to be sacrificial and forgiving and to go beyond the superficial. To go beyond the like and the attraction and the lust and the pleasure and the butterflies. To love as Jesus did and be willing to die out of pure love. That's alot to live towards. A Love Life is hard to live. I wish from the depths of my heart that I could live that kind of life, though. A suicidal love- love until it kills me.


(we all nee a little Princess Bride true love in our lives, right? ;o) )