God is Love.

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, 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."

Everyone has their own perspectives on love. The dictionary definition of love is: a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person. Love is an emotion, love is a feeling, love is many different things. But true love is different from what we call "love". In my psychology class I remember my professor telling me the average person is "in love" with their significant other for two years, and than after that it's all about commitment and how long they are willing to make it work. The love we see on television, in movies, and in our lives around people always make us want that in our own lives. Society depicts this image to us of what love is, showing it through media and other forms of advertising. But the thing that society is forgetting is, that without God in the relationship, there will never be true love. God is the only one that can teach us about true love. The relationship we have with Him as Christians, he shows us true love by showing patience, being kind, not being easily angered by our sins and neglect towards Him, etc. When we get into a relationship with someone, we should always base it on a relationship with God as the center of our attentions to know and learn true love for each other. Of course it's easier said than done, right? For me personally, I can't recall a time in the past when I was dating a girl and God was the center of the relationship. We were always in the "honeymoon phase" and wanting to see and talk to each other as much as we can, and when we couldn't see each other we would think about that person as much as we can. This was a big reason why most of my relationships did not work out, because of the simple fact that the girl was taking me away from God instead of strengthening my relationship with Him. Now I am looking for a girl that will not only accept me for who I am, all my faults and imperfections in life, but also bring me closer to God. I recently just saw "Valentines Day" with a few friends. In that movie the part I liked best was when the grandma said "When you truly love someone, you have to love everything about them. All their faults, all their imperfections, and not only the good things." That really stuck out to me, because how many times in life do we look for the easy way out when we find out something we don't like about our significant other? We totally forget all the reasons why you love her and you only look at that imperfection that you find out. Now I'm not saying this happens all the time, but I know it's happened to me a couple of times in the past. When I would find out something that I didn't really like about the girl I was dating, I would start examining more and more on what else I didn't like and than I would usually just end it somehow. Of course I know now how stupid I was, because I'm not perfect and she was willing to see past my imperfections and be with me, but back than I had a different mindset. There is this quote: "Love isn't about finding the perfect person, but seeing an imperfect person perfectly." That quote is true in so many ways. Many people have this mindset of what their perfect girl/guy is in their mind, but what they tend to forget is that love is not about finding that "perfect one". Love is when you see past a person's imperfections and you love them for who they are, flaws and all. So to fix this, we really need to take that image of what we think the perfect person is for us, and just have an open mind with every person we meet. No relationship is the same, it all depends on the two people in that relationship. So when we are in a relationship and start to compare it to a relationship we had before and wonder why it's not the same when you were so "in love" in the other relationship, that can ruin something great with the person you have now if you keep that mindset. For these past few months, I feel that God is really trying to teach me to depend on Him and Him alone, and stop depending on girls like how I used to in the past. Every time I would end with one girl, right after or a few weeks later another girl would come into my life and I never really rejected it because to be honest it felt good to have that comfort and know someone cares about you. But I forgot about the person that cares for me the most in this world, the person that is the only one that can truly love me, and that person is God. So now I'm just setting my sights on him and making my relationship stronger and learning things that I will need to know when I meet the next girl I will be in a relationship with. God is not only love, but He is true love and where we learn it from. Thanks for reading.



-Paul Lem.