By Terry Elsberry
I Will Always Love You
My wife Nancy and I were watching a re-run of Sixty Minutes. One segment we’d already seen, but it was so arresting we watched it again.
The part of the show we found fascinating was an interview with a husband and wife in Harlem who have a project of finding over-fifty-year-old African American singers to help immortalize old time blues, swing and Gospel music before they’re lost forever.
How? By calling for auditions to choose singers to both make CDs and perform in occasional shows. The bits of music we heard were great. Some wonderful voices! But still more powerful were the personal life stories that came pouring out as people shared stories of times past that made their music such an important part of their lives.
For some, music helped them overcome adversity–the old man who was illiterate and masked his embarrassment and shame because he has a wonderful voice; another man who was in prison for years and met a woman who had a ministry of visiting inmates. She loved to hear him sing. They fell in love and when he was free were married. Most often, the stories were about love.
One man’s story was a story of love never known. This delightful guy with a big smile and bright, cheerful expression was given up for adoption at birth. He never knew who his parents were. He was moved from foster home to foster home. For years instead of a name he had a number. Finally, a Catholic priest took pity on him and gave him both a first and a last name. He carries the name still. It’s who he is. Music, his fine singing voice, became his saving grace.
But always, always through the years he longed to know who his mother was. Now he’s over fifty, and he still wonders.
“My agony,” he told interviewer Leslie Stahl, “is this. I want to know if my mother gave me up because she was too young or too poor and knew she couldn’t care for me right or was afraid. I don’t want to think she gave me up because she didn’t love me.”
Leslie Stahl said, “I have a psychiatrist friend who always asks her clients this question: ‘When you were a child, who did you know loved you? I mean really loved you, loved you unconditionally.” The light went out of the man’s face. His smile died. He said, “When I was growing up, nobody loved me.”
The man is, sadly, wrong of course. The Lord loved him. Mother or no mother, God loves him. That is the tragedy of so much of human experience. Because people are not unconditionally loved by the primary people in their lives who SHOULD love them that way, they turn to all manner of self-defeating, too often self-damaging, even self-destructive habits to compensate. If only they could experience the all-embracing love of God in Jesus Christ, they would not have to go through such torment–torment for themselves and all too often for the people around them.
If you want to know what love looks like, look at Him. He’s here with us today, and He says to us: “I have always loved you. I will always love you.”
And when we know we’re loved, loved without reservation, it’s remarkable what we can overcome. What pain and suffering we can endure. What humiliation and rejection we can survive. Because we know at the deepest level that we are loved. When everything else falls away, love still stands. It can carry us through anything.
What does God’s love look like? Read the Bible from cover to cover looking for the theme of love and you’ll find God actively loving His people through all the thousands of years. One of the Bible’s many themes is the theme of how much He loves us. Taken from that angle, the Bible is a love story.
Two graphic examples of that are the words in today’s lessons.
The best description of love ever written is the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, in the thirteenth chapter.
HERE’S WHAT LOVE LOOKS LIKE
“Love is very patient and kind, never jealous or envious, never boastful or proud. Never haughty or selfish or rude. Love does not demand its own way. It is not irritable or touchy. It does not hold grudges and will hardly even notice when others do it wrong. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever truth wins out.
“If you love someone you will be loyal to them no matter what the cost. You will always believe in them, always expect the best of them, and always stand your ground in defending them.
“All the special gifts and powers from God will someday come to an end, but love goes on forever. Of all the gifts the greatest is love.”
LOVE IS THE GREATEST POWER IN THE WORLD.
And Paul graphically shows us here what real love looks like. He shows us how God loves us. But here’s the shocker, here’s the showstopper: He expects US to love like this, too.
Me? Love like this, like Paul lays out here in First Corinthians 13? Fine for Jesus to love like that, but me? Come on, Lord, makes sweet reading at a wedding, goes nicely with young love and white flowers and the happy couple. But you’re expecting ME to love like this?
The answer is yes. What Paul describes with great precision is what Godly love is. It’s the love you and I are supposed to practice, too. We have here both the what and the how of real love.
The problem is, of course, that He’s God! Of course, HE knows how to love, He IS love, the Bible says. I’m not God. I’m not love. I’m me. I’m just old Ter, this mixed bag of energies and emotions, doing the best I can, with His help. What about you? What about any of us? How can we be expected to measure up to Paul’s picture of what love looks like?
But we are expected to do just that. Paul goes on in the first verse of the next chapter to give us our marching orders. He says, “MAKE LOVE YOUR AIM.” Another version says, “Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it–because it does.” Another: “Eagerly pursue and seek to acquire this love–make it your aim, your great quest.”
We know what Jesus told His disciples, how the most important things are to love God and each other. Okay, Lord, I hear You. But how? How do I love like you love? How do I make loving others my life quest? Here’s how.
HOW TO LOVE IN THREE STEPS
Decide. Ask. Practice.
One. We have to decide. We have to make the decision that obeying God’s command to love is what we want to do. Is it a worthwhile life goal? There may be a whole lot of other things I’d find more satisfying, things that would take a whole lot less effort, come a whole lot more naturally. But Paul says love is the only thing that lasts forever.
Two. Ask. Should we decide we’re going to make love our aim and loving like Jesus loves us our great quest, what next? Ask, that’s what. We can’t do it on our own. The good news is He never expected us to do it on our own. No way we could. He’s here to help us. Ask for His help.
Pray something like this: Lord, help me love like You love, in the ways you love. Love these people through me, by Your Holy Spirit. Make me Your conduit of love.
Three. Practice. Sometimes, even with His help, we do a pretty good job, sometimes an amazing job of loving–not only the lovable but the unlovable, too. Sometimes we’re tired or stressed or sick or down and we completely blow it. But when that happens, don’t give up. Never give up. Because He never gives up on us. Pick yourself up, beg for His help and go back at it. Go back to the golden task of loving.
And when it’s really working, when you’re in the flow, and He’s loving people through you and you’re in the place of giving and forgiving and caring and compassion, when you’re in the zone of actively loving other people, then you will find a sense of satisfaction nothing else can match.
The man without a mother didn’t give up and let himself stay sunk in misery and defeat. He told Leslie Stahl he’d made up the mother he never knew. He gave her loving traits. He gave her a name. He called her Georgia. When he sings his theme song as an entertainer, the old song “Georgia on my Mind,” he sings it to her. By loving the mother he’s never known, he feels loved in return.
That’s one of love’s many miracles. When we love, we feel loved ourselves. It’s a miracle only God could devise. He who loves us no matter what. He who loves us just the way we are. He who will love us always.
