It seems that love is ubiquitous. Even Adolf Hitler had his loves. But like him I can only love you so much and no more and that is how it is with you too. There are limits to our loving...it does not in actuality go beyond our liking. Love is for us an ebb and flow of sensibilities. There is a reasonableness to love that is perpetuated by the myth of the straightness of our thinking and evaluating. When it comes to love, we make decisions on it based on how we determine the rightness and wrongness of each other. Fairness of love is evaluated constantly. We love but only so far...so far as we think is best. Love was never intended to be reasonable though. It is as chaotic as a hurricane when it gets in the hands of God. The swirl of crashing wants and desires wrecks our love at every turn. But God's love is determined; a bulldog that won't be budged. He loves the adulterer, the molester, the perverter of justice, the liar, the racist and the despot. The miracle of God is that He somehow turns the sins of the many into the Sin of the One and through Christ, Love is unleashed into the unreasonable world. I cannot love a single person I don't like yet in the boundless mercy of God, I have the capacity to love where love is not found in me. No Christian with the Love of Christ in him or her can say, "I cannot love that far!" We can. And we must. If God has worked His way in us, then His love must work its way out of us or we will be the most miserable of creatures. Love withheld becomes a stench within. But when we let His love flow from us wherever He chooses to take it, a swelling joy takes it place so that it too spills out like Mary's perfume...which she poured out onto Christ in love.
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 1 John 4: 7-8 NIV
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