Love is...

People love to read 1 Corinthians 13 at weddings...In this passage, Paul explains to us the practical side of "agape" love. That is the unconditional love that God shows to us. It is a love that is shown in how it responds to life's challenges and more importantly how we live our lives day by day. The passage does not focus so much upon what love is, but upon what love does and does not do. 

When I really think about love, there is a specific person in my life that comes to mind that I think really understood this kind of love.  And I would like to honor her today because she passed away this morning.  My sweet Grandma, Jan Diven.  

I know Grandparents are supposed to just love love love on their Grandkids.  But my Grandma lived love and lived loved.   Her relationship with my Grandpa taught me exactly what love in a marriage is supposed to look like and that I should not settle for anything less.  Her love for me and our relationship (that grew into a friendship as I became and adult) showed me what living in hope and faith look like.  Her strength in her final days of battling cancer, worrying not for herself, but for each person she was soon to leave behind, taught me one last lesson about what selflessness looks like.

I was extremely blessed to have gotten to spend a weekend alone with her and my Grandpa at their house earlier this month.  While making the trip was a difficult one (as I knew that it would likely be the very last time I got to spend time with her), I am thankful that God gave me the opportunity to say goodbye while she was still fully there in body and mind. 

I'm a little tickled now that she is in Heaven with our Jesus.  We should all be so lucky to know with absolute certainty that our death is really just us going home to our Maker to begin a blessed eternity.  I know with her He is very well pleased and He was waiting so anxiously to hold her in His arms, release her from the pain of her earthly body and say:

"Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little so I set you over much. Enter now into the joy of your master."  ~ Matt. 25:23

 

"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,but do not have love, I gain nothing. 

 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.  For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love" 
~1 Cor. 13