I've been thinking about...

Love.

And as I do from time to time when I’m thinking about such monumental theological things, I turned to theologian, humorist, minister, and author Frederick Buechner’s “Wishful Thinking.” Here is an excerpt from what he has to say about it.

LOVE

The first stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love. The middle stage is to believe that there are many kinds of love and that the Greeks had a different word for each of them. The last stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love…
To say that love is God is romantic idealism. To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.
In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as easily produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus’ terms, we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.

You’ve just gotta love Frederick Buechner ... even if you don’t like him!

Yours in the journey, Rev. Brian