Love.

I see it everywhere, the popular phrase to live, love, laugh. Sometimes it’s expanded, saying something for each word, with the word “love” followed by “love as though you’ve never been hurt.” Sometimes the word “breathe” is thrown in.

It annoys me.

In my life, all three (or four) are somehow interconnected which means if one is slipping through my fingers, the grasping for the others is clutching for sand at the edge of the pit I’m sliding into.

But I’ll let it go as inspirational niceties.

Except love.

Love is complicated. And loving as if you’ve never been hurt is really no love at all. Love is revealed in its truest form because of hurt.

I wrote about love, paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 13.

There’s a well-known (and sadly overused at weddings) poem by a man named Roy Croft that has some interesting things to say about love.

“I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.
I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out…”

That’s nice.

I’ve heard multiple sermons on the different forms of “love” in the Bible that try to flesh out the different aspects of love, and how the English language is sorely lacking in that we have one word for it that doesn’t help us understand what it really is.

We love pizza. We love a sports team. We love our dog. We love our spouse. We love God. We love our friend. We have conditional love, love that is based on how something is returned to us, love that changes with feelings and situations and temperaments.

In a church sermon a few weeks ago, this was made clear to me. We love because. God loves. We love because someone loves us in return. We love because we deem it worthy or because we feel romantic feelings toward someone.

For God so loved.

Not because. Not on a condition.

What do you do with 1 John 4:8? How do we wrap our minds around the idea that, in all of this other understanding, that God is love? He is love. The embodiment of it, despite our petty understanding of love which says “love shouldn’t hurt!” when pain has nothing to do with it.

I find myself being asked to love in this other way. It’s not difficult in the sense that it isn’t deserved or that the recipient is “unworthy”, but it is difficult because I’m finding that once the easy, conditional romantic feeling of love is out of the way, the love that God asks of us all — no conditions, a love we choose to give, a decision and commitment to love, a love that forgives, an on-your-knees-praying love, that true 1 Corinthians 13 love — is an even more brutal connection.

Brutal, because it sticks. It requires more. It doesn’t find excuses to dissipate. It reminds me that I chose to love, that I said I would do anything asked of me. It asks me to put aside my own selfishness and wants. The price, the stakes, are higher, the connection stronger. It’ll take you through the grinder with the other person. It carries burdens, and it lifts up even when your own strength is in doubt. You can’t earnestly pray for a person and not find yourself slipping into this kind of love. And in the end, I suspect, it is a far richer love than some will ever experience because they somehow got away in life with conditional or selfish love, and no more.

So live, love, laugh? Love as if you’ve never been hurt?

Loving as if you’ve never been hurt is a shallow love, indeed. It’s a love that never learned the truth. Love, instead, as if you’ve been crushed. Love anyway. It’s much better.