I remember when I was in Fourth Year High School; I made an essay about Love and this is how it goes:
“When people talk about the word LOVE, it would take so much time to understand what it really means..”
Love perhaps is the most powerful force in Life. It satisfies a persons’ deepest emotional needs; the need to belong, to feel appreciated and to be wanted. Is love the most complicated feeling ever felt by a person? Is it that hard to understand?
Some say, if you need love, you get confused, you get blank, you feel conscious, you feel like you're in a place with four corners. Love comes in different forms, may be express in countless ways, and can be felt anytime and anywhere. It is when you give in a part of yourself, simply because that something really matters to you. Love is priceless. It is everybody to be given freely and wholeheartedly. It chooses no one as it comes naturally to those who feel and then express it their own very special way. Hence, it is not shown with lust and immorality but rather shown with respect.
If love would meet an individual’s life, it is as if wings formed on your back, lets you fly up high and makes you feel comfortable. It also makes you feel like a complete person. Love has so many symbols-a rose, a simple letter, a red heart, a chocolate and many others. However, if love were like a thick book, its pages lead to infinity. Love greatly affects your entire system and how you perceive things in life. It can never be measured nor quantified, it could only be felt with the purest intentions-no why’s, no how’s. No ifs and no buts.
In the search for love, I discovered God.
*****
After five years, here I am again, redefining what love is.
Just this afternoon, I watched a video on youtube about the true meaning of love. While watching, I was able to realize that I already knew what love is. It’s just that what I think contradicts to what I want to do.
Love is a choice. Love is sacrifice. Love hurts.
LOVE IS A CHOICE.
This is an excerpt from Rick Warren’s; The Bible says love is a choice..
“That you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” (Deuteronomy 30:20 NIV)
Today we’ve bought into this myth that love is uncontrollable, that it’s something that just happens to us. In fact, even the language we use implies the uncontrollability of love. We say, “I fell in love,” as if love is some kind of a ditch. It’s like I’m walking along one day and — bam! — I fell in love. I couldn’t help myself. But I have to tell you the truth: That’s not love. Love doesn’t just happen to you. Love is a choice, and it represents a commitment.
You must choose to love God; he won’t force you to love him (Deuteronomy 30:20). You can thumb your nose at God and go a totally different way. You can destroy your life if you choose to do that. God still won’t force you to love him because he knows love can’t be forced.
This same principle is true about your relationships: You can choose to love others, but God won’t force you to love anyone.
What? Did he say that love cannot be forced? That means, we must accept that there are times wherein the one we love does not love us back. Is there someone who loves you but you just can’t return the love? Love is certainly a choice and with a little praying, God will help you love that person if you make the choice to do so.
That doesn’t mean everything will become perfect; it doesn’t even mean that person will accept your love. But you are the only person who can stop you from loving someone else — because love is a choice you make.
LOVE IS SACRIFICE.
The purpose driven life book says, the essence of love is sacrifice because God sacrificed His own son just to save us from our sin. As young as I am, I have sacrificed a lot for my friends, loved ones, and family just to show them my unconditional love. They say, that’s how you know if you love a certain person if you are willing to sacrifice. One sacrifice would be your single life. Once you’ve found the right person you can sacrifice anything that you enjoyed doing before when you were still single. All that you would want to do is to spend all of your time with the person you love. Some people would even cut someone or several others out of their life if these people are not supportive of the relationship they have with their significant other. It’s a great sacrifice but you are willing to do it for love.
BUT..
Love must be the reason why you feel good. Love must be your inspiration. Love must be the reason why you were able to know who you really are. Love should complement you. If your relationship makes you forget to study, makes you wake up late and be late in school too then, there must be something wrong with the love you thought. Love, should inspire you. Love should bring out the BEST in you.
LOVE HURTS.
Why love hurts? I found this article in Osho time and here it goes..
Love is painful because it creates the way for bliss. Love is painful because it transforms. Love is mutation. Each transformation is going to be painful because the old has to be left for the new.
The man who is without love is narcissistic, he is closed. He knows only himself. And how much can he know himself if he has not known the other, because only the other can function as a mirror? You will never know yourself without knowing the other. Love is very fundamental for self-knowledge too. The person who has not known the other in deep love, in intense passion, in utter ecstasy, will not be able to know who he is, because he will not have the mirror to see his own reflection.
And then there are problems, problems which are meaningless. There are problems which are creative because they lead you to higher awareness. There are problems which lead you nowhere’ they simply keep you tethered, they simply keep you in your old mess.
Love creates problems. You can avoid those problems by avoiding love. But those are very essential problems! They have to be faced, encountered’ they have to be lived and gone through and gone beyond. And to go beyond, the way is through. Love is the only real thing worth doing. All else is secondary. If it helps love, it is good. All else is just a means, love is the end. So whatsoever the pain, go into love.
If you don’t go into love, as many people have decided, then you are stuck with yourself. Then your life is not a pilgrimage, then your life is not a river going to the ocean’ your life is a stagnant pool, dirty, and soon there will be nothing but dirt and mud. To keep clean, one needs to keep flowing.
Hence people are interested in sex, because sex is not risky. It is momentary, you don’t get involved. Love is involvement’ it is commitment. It is not momentary. Once it takes roots, it can be forever. It can be a lifelong involvement. Love needs intimacy, and only when you are intimate does the other become a mirror. When you meet sexually with a woman or a man, you have not met at all’ in fact, you avoided the soul of the other person. You just used the body and escaped, and the other used your body and escaped. You never became intimate enough to reveal each other’s original faces.
It is painful, but don’t avoid it. If you avoid it you have avoided the greatest opportunity to grow. Go into it, suffer love, because through the suffering comes great ecstasy. Yes, there is agony, but out of the agony, ecstasy is born. Yes, you will have to die as an ego, but if you can die as an ego, you will be born as God. Love will give you the first proof that God is, that life is not meaningless.
So there it goes. Love is a choice, Love is sacrifice and Love hurts but my whole approach here is that of LOVE. I teach only love and only love and nothing else. You can forget about God’ that is just an empty word. You can forget about prayers because they are only rituals imposed by others on you. Love is the natural prayer, not imposed by anybody. You are born with it. Love is the true God. Love is a process, a method, to kill you as a separate individual and to help you become the infinite. Disappear as a dewdrop and become the ocean, but you will have to pass through the door of love.
And certainly when one starts disappearing like a dewdrop, and one has lived long as a dewdrop, it hurts, because one has been thinking, “I am this, and now this is going. I am dying. ” You are not dying, but only an illusion is dying. You have become identified with the illusion, true, but the illusion is still an illusion. And only when the illusion is gone will you be able to see who you are. And that revelation brings you to the ultimate peak of joy, bliss, celebration.
Inspired by this video:
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