We read a story once about an anthropologist who spent months on a Hoppe Indian reservation in a desert, studying the ways of the people. He was especially fascinated by the rituals of the medicine man. He carefully watched him, asking after each prayer, or each story-telling, or each ritual, what its significance had been.
The medicine man’s answer was always the same: “Water.” Finally, the anthropologist asked, “Why is it that everything you do and say always relates to water?”
The medicine man answered, “There is not much water here in the desert. It is very scarce and very valuable to us. I guess that is why we talk about it so much.”
Then the medicine man paused and asked the anthropologist a question. “I listen sometimes to the music on the radio which people of your culture write and perform,” he said. “It is almost always about love. Is that because you have so little of it?”
Now that’s something to wonder about, isn’t it? We do talk about love a lot. It’s a word that slides easily off our tongues. We say: I love my spouse. I love key lime pie. I love humanity. I love playing bridge. I love God. But there is imprecision in using the same word to describe our relationship to both our favorite dessert and the Creator of the universe.
What does it really mean to love?
Most observers of our world today would probably assert that despite our frequent use of the word, love is actually in fairly short supply among us. Tempers flare. Patience is strained. Hardships grow as compassion diminishes. Cultural civility appears to be declining.
Where’s the love?
Could it be that we are going about this all wrong? Many of us may tend to believe that love is a warm feeling we fall into rather blindly, without forethought or restraint. But Biblically speaking, love is described more often as a decision than a feeling. People are not expected to love accidentally. They are expected to decide to love. In fact, they are commanded to love.
So love must be a serious, deliberate business. It must be something we can pursue as diligently as we pursue the acquisition of knowledge or assets or life goals.
Are you committed to striving to love – deeply, fully, intentionally, selflessly, extravagantly? Time and again, authors, theologians, preachers, and philosophers have tried to tell us of the importance of love.
But we like the way the English poet William Blake put it best: “Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.”
Wouldn’t it be magnificent one day to have an anthropologist study our lives and discover that we did far more than talk about love? We’re praying someday someone will ask us all, “Where’s the love?” and we’ll be able to point to countless hellish places into which we dared to bring something of heaven’s hope and heaven’s love.
No shortage of love here. No shortage at all.
