“We love because…” – 1 John 4:19

Love is a response.

It’s a response to love from someone else. The response is natural. And like almost all behavior, it is learned through imitation.

In your first few years, you learn to love by watching and listening to the people who are most important to you, who first model love to you — probably your parents and relatives. You attempt to reflect similar loving behavior back, and watch eagerly for encouraging feedback. Hopefully, plenty of smiles, exclamations, and “pats on the back” are supplied.

As the first few years pass, and your brain and language develop, your discernment and other skills improve. Learning how to love becomes more sophisticated and nuanced. Hard lessons are taught: You cannot remain the center of attention. You need to share, help, and give to others.

As you grow older, you draw on the stores of love you banked from those who are most important to you, who loved you. You reflect that love back to other people, not merely your parents or family, and your group of most important people changes. You discover, however, that love isn’t always reciprocated. People you try to love sometimes, perhaps often, either ignore you, or respond negatively. It’s confusing, and it hurts.

You also discover that, unfortunately, you sometimes do the same.

As you build your independent world, you inevitably find three related axioms you must come to terms with:

1. The people from whom you learned to love, were imperfect models. Some may have been very imperfect.
2. You weren’t the best student.
3. The first two axioms also apply to the people with whom you interact everyday — your spouse, your best friends, your boss, your customers, and your co-workers.

Generation after generation has repeated the cycle of imperfect modeling, and imperfect learning, of love. You are born into a broken world. You probably had your share of bad experiences. Someone you once deeply loved, respected, relied upon, and trusted has “done a number” on you. Nothing in the modeling of love you received, or learned, was able to compensate for the ensuing pain and broken trust. This consumes you because matters of love burrow deep into your core. It determines who you think you are, and what you believe you are worth, but it remains outside your immediate control. 

Your self worth, by definition, is what you think about yourself. But it’s a response. It’s a response determined by what you perceive the most important people in your life think about you. Do they love, value, and respect you? More important, do they convince you that they do?

You need the most important person in your life to be an ideal model of love, and you need to become the best student you can be, and believe them when they tell you that they love you, respect you, and forgive you.

— Perhaps place here, instead, paragraph about substitution —

Beneath the pain and layers of calloused cynicism it can cause, you remain hard-wired to love. As you search for it, you begin to notice ripples emanating from its distant wake everywhere. You’re moved by particular songs, poetry, or literature that comehow seem to hit resonant frequency down in your core. Combined with a distant memory, this moves you to lift your gaze in hope.

You notice head and keep searching. move us to begin a new search in hope… novels looking for that better model —

The more you search, the better you are able to recognize when a better love is extended to you. When you recognize it, you can respond to it. When you respond, you get to experience it. The better love has amazing healing and transforming power.

In following articles, we will be exploring the Gospel of John. The author of the book indicates that Jesus was God’s idea for man – the perfect model. In fact, the writer refers to himself in the book on a couple of occasions merely as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” There may be several reasons he does this. I can’t help but believe it’s because over the years his faith taught him that in the end – actually, in the beginning – that Jesus models God’s perfect love to us, and our job is to imitate and reflect that love to the world.

“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us…” – 1 John 4:10

Join me in a journey through John’s Gospel. Look for the ways God loves you, and in the end – like John – you will know yourself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”

Next: God’s Idea