different types of love

With Valentines day here, I guess it’s appropriate that I’m pondering love. Actually, I’m reading this wonderful book called Enjoying God by S.J. Hill. I highly recommend it.

What has been running through my mind is the verse out of Song of Songs “You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride.”

It’s a verse that can pierce you if you let it. But what I noticed is how the author described the beloved as both a sister and a bride. You see, there are several different kinds of love of this earth. Some of the girls on my hall last night were laughing about the fact that we often say, “I love him, but I don’t like love him love him you know.”

There is a love that lovers feel toward one another. I have felt just a taste of it. Often it is very stomach turning. You have butterflies and can’t sit still. You can’t eat or sleep. You day dream all the time. Even when the emotions and feeling dies down, they still make you feel good inside in a different sort of way. And when that special someone isn’t with you, you have an irrational desire to be with them all the time. You want to be with them more than anything, even if you aren’t talking to one another. You long for their presence.

There is a love that siblings have. I love both my brother and my sister very much. It’s a very deep love that can’t easily be put out. It’s a defensive love. I would stand up for Bethany and Levi any time anywhere, period. It is also a comfortable love. I don’t have mushy feelings for them, I just love them. I enjoy their company. They are my flesh and blood.

There is the love a parent has for a child. Since I am not a parent, I only can tell you what other people have told me. A parent would do anything, and I do mean anything, for their child. A mother with a baby is the most protective creature you will ever know. A parent is absolutely irrationally captured by their children. They don’t have to do anything or be anyone for a parent to love them. They can poop and smell and cry and be completely ungrateful. It doesn’t matter. A parent’s love will prevail.

Then there is the love a child has for a parent. This love is still deep. The loss of a parent is a sorrow I cannot imagine. I don’t want to imagine. I love my parents so much. It’s funny though, I have a hard time showing love to them. And although I hate to admit, I know they love me more.

There is a love that friends have. This comes in all different shapes and sizes and expressions. I love my girl friends in a similar way that I love my sister, and I love many of my guy friends in a similar way that I love my brother.

Back to the parents and children. I think it is so perfect that God made it that parents love their children more than children could ever love their parents. It doesn’t make sense. Children do nothing for their parents and parents do everything for their children. Logically it should be the other way around, and children should love their parents more than parents love their children. But it isn’t that way on earth because it isn’t that way with God. God will always love us more than we could ever love Him.

The beauty of all these types of love is that they aren’t just convenient metaphors for God’s love. No. they are deliberate intentional metaphors for God’s love. Think about Adam and Eve. Adam was perfect, the world he lived in was perfect, he communed perfectly with the perfect God. And yet God created Eve, so he would have someone else to love. Then God explains to us all throughout the bible that we are the Bride and He is the Bridegroom. He is our husband. He was perfect and lived in perfection. He loved His perfect Son who perfectly loved Him back. Yet He created us.

But God’s love goes beyond the love a man and woman have for each other, so they had children. And they loved their children. More and more people came to the earth meaning more and more different types of love. If you take the purest form of every kind of love imaginable, mix them together, and multiply it by infinity, then you get a small taste of the love God has for you! Amazing! He thinks about you all the time. He can’t get you out of His head. You have invaded His every thought and emotion. He is defensive of you. He will do anything for you. He longs just to be with you. He wants just to talk to you for as long as you will talk to Him. And He will talk to you about anything, it doesn’t matter. He is just absolutely totally hopelessly in love with you!