Love Is A Four Letter Word

My language leads a lot to be desired. Its just something I've never been truly able to get a hold of since I became a Christian, and now those ugly four letter words, so good at emphasizing a joke, tend to slip into my everyday vocabulary too easily.

For me, the thing about four letter words is that as soon as they’ve been said, I instantly regret them. And you can’t take them back.

The dictionary will probably disagree, but I think that ‘swearing’ is whenever you use a word outside of its actual meaning. The problem with this is when a word is misused with any great frequency, it just becomes filler in a sentence – it loses all meaning, and it’s the meaning that’s important.

It not just ‘cuss’ words we do this with either - there are other important examples, and one I want to talk about is the L word.

L-O-V-E.

Love. One syllable encapsulating a concept worthy of the redemption of the human race. In 1 Corinthians 13 it says..

Love (Agape) is patient, love (Agape) is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love (Agape) does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

The above description doesn’t really answer the question of what love is, however it tells me that love is something that isn’t generally found in our nature.

All of the negative attributes listed.. envy, pride, selfishness, grudges are the default for us as human beings, and so I think that Love is when we care about a person so much that we try to become more. We override self to draw close to someone, sacrificing ourselves for their benefit.

I believe that this four letter word is one that has been sullied by too many episodes of soaps, and misused by too many American school girls (stereotyping I know...) to be of any real use...

The real meaning has been lost in the ether, in the static of 21^st century people trying to reconcile what love actually is with the distorted world views pushed upon them.

I think that its time for a change. A revamp and a facelift on the whole concept.

In the bible Love is translated in many places from a Greek word ‘Agape’, which defines a specific type of love which we need to aspire to. Matthew 22:37-41 would read:

‘Agape the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Agape your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

We need to reclaim the positive nature of this statement, to ‘Agape’ all of those around us.

That way at least one word in my vocabulary will be right and true.