By Pastor Dave Dillon 

I hope this op-ed finds you well. God bless each and every one of you this week in the name of Christ. 

I hope this op-ed finds you well. God bless each and every one of you this week in the name of Christ. 

Paul, in Romans 13:8, describes love as a debt we owe one another. I don’t often think of love as a debt that I owe everyone. Do you? Think about how we most often talk about and (mis)understand love. We say we love all sorts of stuff. I love my car. I love video games. I LOVE the Chik-Fil-A spicy chicken sandwich. But I also love my wife. So, Is a Chik-Fil-A sandwich really on the same level as my wife? No… that sandwich is sooo much higher! (It’s was a joke, settle down!) 

I suspect most of us often associate love with romance and particular feelings. We fall in love and we fall out of love. Are my feelings the reason I love? When we talk about our loving someone when we’re young, we talk about having so much in common. When my wife and I got married, we enjoyed a lot of the same stuff. Now, we enjoy different stuff. Would I really stop loving her or love her less because we developed different interests over life? 

What if love has no reasons? What if love has no “why” or “because” behind it? What if we just love because we love? What if loving is the most natural, and sometimes the most difficult, thing we do? In love songs, we hear, “You complete me.” “You’re my everything.” “I can’t live if living is without you.” Is it an expression of my love or an expression of my codependence? Ever had someone say to you, “If you love me, you would ___”? (Fill in the blank) Maybe love is never as easy or simple as we often think it is… or want it to be. 

And Paul doesn’t base this debt of love on who the other is – whether we like him or her, have feelings or reasons for loving, or consider the other to be worthy or deserving of our love. What would it be like if we loved like that? Love, as described by Paul, is an endless debt we owe to one another. It never gets paid in full. Love isn’t a transaction it’s an ongoing relationship, a way of being with and toward another. We should never say, “I loved,” but “I am loving.” It’s ongoing and some days we do it well and other days we struggle. Either way the debt remains. 

So we love beyond the feelings, without reasons, even if it’s not reciprocated, no matter how much effort it takes or how deeply it breaks our heart. We just love because that’s who we are, because that’s who God is. It seems to me that if we are not paying on this obligation and loving one another then we are just foreclosing on our own heart. And I don’t want to do to that. I hope you don’t either. Together… we need to learn how to love each other. 

Let me know what your thinking or send me a question to pastordaveumc@gmail.com

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