What is Love?

What is Love?  More specifically what is the Love that Christ calls us to?  To love everyone (not just those who love us or whom we are attracted to) as He loves us.  How can we do that?

If the love you are thinking of is the kind of love you feel toward someone you are attracted to that isn't the kind of love we are talking about.  That kind of feeling itself isn't always love.  What is Love?  To love someone is to want what is best for them, to want them to go to heaven.  You can be attracted to someone and want to possess them and keep them for yourself.  Or you can be attracted to someone and want what isn't best for them.  Attraction isn't love.

Love is more of a decision than a feeling.  Love isnt that giddy feeling you feel when you are romantically in love with someone.  We have to love even those who repulse us and even those who have sinned against us.  We love them by praying for them and leading them to reform through our love.

Our love should bear fruit.  If it doesn't bear fruit we need to examine what we think is love and root out all pride and judgement.  Only by striving to love as Christ loved can we bear fruit.  We don't have to do great things, as Mother Teresa says we just have to do small things with great love.  Our love should push us to love the poor and to really assist them with not only money but with our our time.  We have to love the unlovely, even if that person is ourselves.

Love comes from the truth.  It is based in the truth and it has to start with ourselves.  We have to truly know ourselves and love ourselves.  Not in a self-centered way.  We have to truely know ourselves and our faults and know that God loves us to truely love ourselves.  We have to love who we are and not some ideal of ourselves.  Once we do that in some small measure we can move out of ourselves and love others.  We don't have to know and love ourselves perfectly before we love others, but we have to start.  When we move out of ourselves we will learn more about ourselves.

I have struggled greatly with loving myself and others.  I could see all my faults and I didn't unstand how I could love someone so flawed?  How could anyone love someone who was so wrong?  Then one day God made it clear to me He loved me.  That was so hard to accept.  I didn't understand what He was doing.  I fell in love with the Beloved slowly.  As I came to love Him I came to accept myself.  Loving God and accepting myself I have been drawn to accept and now love others.  I am working on truly loving myself and all others.  I now know that i love imperfect people so as an imperfect person I am also lovable.  The one thing I know now, God loves ALL of us and wants us to know and love Him.