In the Case of Love

Love is such a strange thing. In the english language there is only one word for it and yet it is said to communicate so much. I love daisies, I love reading,  I love my family. Heck I even love the idea of love. I don't love daisies however the way I love my family. Not even close.

The greeks had eight different words that describe love and give multiply types of love. In Hebrew there are seven different words for love. English only has one. We say stuff like "I love you like a brother," or "I love you as a friend," in order to clarify just how we love someone. in part it comes down to tone and inflection.

Then there are times where 'love' just doesn't seem to cut it. It's said so much and so often that we have become desensitized to the gravity of love. It should mean more.

Love is something that all human beings search for. We build our whole lives around it and in some cases form our entire identity around love. "For God so loved the world...," God loved the world so much he gave his only son. He so loved the world that he gave everything. Everything.

And yet nothing can hurt more than loving someone. A friend once said to me that I love people well and because of this it hurts, that loving people hurts. God later told me it was a privilege to love someone so much it hurt, that to be able to love the way I do is a privilege.

Love is something I'm not sure I'll ever understand. It's something we all innately crave and yet we'll still run away from it because there's the risk of pain. I am in no way innocent of this. In fact I'm rather guilty.

Love is a word we throw around on a daily basis and yet it's so complex I'm not sure we understand what we are doing when we do. But there is something beautiful in that we are so enamoured with our lives and those in them that we cannot help but proclaim love constantly.

Comments

  1. KatieH.May 20, 2020 at 7:34 PM

    Fave blog post so far. I can't stop rereading the third to last paragraph; nothing has quite described my life as a third culture kid better than that. So true. And thank you for bringing up the topic of how Hebrew and Greek have several words for 'love'. Why does English fail so terribly on this point.

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