Keeping love alive…

As we head into the new year I think that relationships is a good place to start and if we're going to talk about healthy relationships you'd guess we would start with love and the secret of love.  A lot of people have a question about that.  So what is the secret to love?  It's sort of mysterious.  A lot of times we don't know why it acts like it acts. 

Why does love in our lives go from exciting to exhausting to expired – the same love for the same person? What makes that happen?

So how do you develop a kind of love that can last for a lifetime – in your marriage, with your kids, with your parents, with friendships, with others – the kind of love that can last a lifetime.  That's the kind of love I want and I think the kind you want. 

Now I have found that teenage love will not satisfy a middle aged couple.  We need love that lasts a lifetime.  Puppy love does not last through the dog days of life.  I want the kind of love in my life that lasts longer than a two-hour movie or 210-page paper-backed novel.

One of the simple things you can do to keep love alive is to ask what love is. How do you do that? 

There are a couple of popular misconceptions about what love really is, based on the fact that love is a word that we use so many ways.  If we're going to really understand how to love somebody we have to start with understanding what it is. 

So what does the word mean?  And that's the key.  If I'm going to learn to love for a lifetime, I've got to understand what this word is all about.

Two popular misconceptions:

1.  Love is only a feeling. 

That's all there is to it.  This feeling, a quiver in my liver, an ocean of emotion – that's love.  But love is more than a feeling.  It affects my feelings, powerfully, but it's more than just a feeling.

2.   Love is uncontrollable. 

A lot of people use words like I feel giddy, I'm in love.  My head's spinning, I'm in love.  I'm weak in the knees, 

It sounds more like sea sickness than love struck – but that's the words that we use to describe love. 

People in love do the craziest things.  We've all heard people say, "I fell in love."  Like you're walking down the street one day, trip, and fell in love, couldn't help it.  That's a real danger of this misconception.  When you say "I fell in love" you're really saying it wasn't my fault, it just happened.  I fell in love with you."  "I fell out of love with you."  "I couldn't help it."

So how do you develop the kind of love that lasts?  You have to understand what real love is all about.  GOD has a different kind of love in our lives.

Just a thought from the front porch…