Love: Why You Need It, Want It, Gotta Have It

Pete Wilson, or better known to me as "The pastor who often blogs the things I wanted to write about 12 hours before me and 10,000x better than I could", wrote about love today in a post entitled Looking for Love.

In it, he raises two points:
1) We crave love.    and
2) We're quite sure that all love has stipulations and conditions.

He then uses Romans 3 to show how God's love contradicts that second point. That God loves unconditionally.

I read a book once, that really spoke to me: Soul Cravings, by Erwin McManus.  McManus says that we, as humans, crave three things: intimacy, destiny, and meaning.  He says in it that these three things are essential to human life. Not just life in Christ, not "good life", but essential to life itself.

We crave love.  We have to have it.  It is a drug stronger than heroin, more addicting than nicotine, and can be more damaging than crystal meth.  We got hooked the moment we were born.

God created us this way- he created us to love, to be loved, to search for love.  We weren't meant to go through life alone.  Now, love doesn't mean romanticized, mushy, "I love you, you love me" kind of love.  It can, but love at its purest just means belonging, at least to me.

C.S. Lewis wrote on the four loves, stating that there are, basically, four types of love: Storge (Affection), Phileo (Friendship), Eros (Romance), and Agape (Unconditional Love).   We may not crave eros, romantical, love.  We might not even crave phileo love, but we all crave storge love.  We all crave affection.

Storge love is, as Lewis put it, "built-in", meaning that we come hardwired with the capability to show affection.  All the other loves require learning what it means to love in that way, but affection is something we know how to do from the beginning.

Just look on playgrounds- there are children who have never met, but playing together with courtesy.  We were created to love and be loved, because a life without love is not a life at all.

We have to have it. Some people turn to friends, others to the opposite sex, and sadly, others will turn to abusive and harmful relationships.  But the thing we must realize as we deal with this built-in desire for love is the person who created us with that love is loving us without any stipulations, strings, or conditions.  God loves us, individually, and desires our love as well.  This love between God and man is what falls under Agape love, the strongest of loves.  The kind of love that sends a son to die painfully and humiliatingly for the sake of the enemy. You won't find that anywhere else.

 Erwin McManus wrote, "To give up on love is to choose a life that is less than human.  To give up on love is to give up on life."