Love, Love, Love

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately is love. Ok, I always think about love. But I've been thinking about how often we actually state our love.   In English we tend to overuse the same word regardless of what is the object of our affection. I love my kitten, my cappuccino and world peace, my mom, that painting over there and my spouse, too.  And yet while we flippantly say "That was the best movie I've ever seen! I LOVED it!!", we typically reserve saying "I love you" directly to others in only the deepest of most intimate types of relationships: Fathers to sons, nieces to beloved aunts, committed boyfriends to girlfriends after many serious DTR's. In our society there is a stigma and a whole set of unwritten rules of behavior for what accompanies those three words. Which makes it really difficult and confusing when we talk about wanting to love our neighbor and our enemy while maintaining health boundaries. I mean in our culture it can be really hard to say that to somebody without it getting really awkward really fast. A woman can say to another woman "Luv u!" and society says they are just good friends. If that same woman says it to a man survey says they better be in a relationship. It has a stigma that are attached to it. So instead of saying it, we're afraid of it and keep it locked away for special occasions.

Saying I love you in a language that has multiple verbs is so much easier than in English. In Greek, for instance, there are 4 different types of love. It' so much easier to clarify your intentions when you say "I philia you" (which is the brotherly type) versus "I eros you" (which means you're horny for them). I feel-e-yah there, too, buddy. If you haven't heard a sermon on the 4 Greek words for love, you should go to church more often (just teasing!!). You can look them up online to see what they are.

Just look at the passage in John 21 when Jesus asks Peter if he loves him. In English he asks Peter the same question 3 times. When I lived in Costa Rica and read this passage for the first time, I realized that in Spanish there is a verb change. And I later found out it's the same in the Greek. The first two times, Jesus asks Peter if he AGAPE loves him, and Peter responds he PHILIA loves him. So the third time Jesus lowers his love standard to Peter's level and asks him is he PHILIA loves him. This is when Peter gets offended. Hasn't he already been saying that? But no, Peter was offering Jesus a lower kind of love than Jesus was looking for. This point was overlooked in sermons I heard for YEARS. There was a distinction in the kind of love Jesus was looking for that one word could not capture.

What I've been thinking about on our word "love" mostly relates back to another post I recently wrote on the power of our words. How powerful is it to hear someone say they love you. And how much more powerful is it for you to say it back? It is a challenge for us where our word is nebulous and can mean anything from hopeless infatuation, intense like, preference, or in favor of. Regardless, we have been called to love. Love God. Love ourselves. Love our neighbors. Love our enemies. We should stop worrying about what others will think and start saying how much we care. And I will start. I love you. I love you a lot. If you need to hear it and not just see it, give me a call. I will tell you. Because it's true. I love you. And you are my favorite.