Monday, January 14, 2013

The Strangest Thing

Has anyone ever asked you why you loved a certain person?
Have you found that to answer that question is actually quite difficult?
Has anyone ever asked you what love... is?

Naturalists believe its a chemical process in your brain.
Taylor Swift (though I love her) seems to equate it with intense infatuation.
Others believe they have it, but learn later that they really didn't at all.
think of all the love songs with so many different perspectives all trying to express the same thing.

This was the subject of an episode of one of the shows Mom and I watch recently.  The question:  What exactly is love?

...

Think about it.  It's actually really hard to put words to it.  To define it.
I pondered this a long time, and kept coming back to one singular answer:

Love never ends.

Parents.  Covenants.  Best Friends.  Old friends. Old romances. 60 years of marriage.  If it is truly a feeling of love, then though situations, chemistry, intellect, and relationships change, though love itself grows and changes, the strange supernatural thing called love never goes away.


Let me not to the marriage of true minds
admit impediments.  Love is not love
which alters when it alteration finds,
or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
that looks on tempests an is never shaken;
it is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
but bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved, 
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
(Sonnet 116, Shakespeare)


Love is patient and kind; love does no envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth   Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.
(Paul, 1 Corinthians 13)

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