Recently I was thinking about love. Society says it is something that Cupid delivers from his pointed arrow. The poet’s pen drips with syrup as he makes his passions rhyme while millions croon along with the latest love ballad on the radio. People talk a lot about it, but what is love? More importantly, what does it look like?

The Bible gives the best answer. First Corinthians 13 describes love better than any dictionary. “Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast.” The entire chapter fills in more details, but the question remains, what does that look like?

A simple answer is, look at the life of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. Jesus modeled the equation, “God is love.” But that was 2,000 years ago. What does love look like today?

One day I looked across the kitchen table at Duang. Her differences from me in personality and perspective seem farther than the distance astronomers give between Mars and Venus. I prayed in my heart, “What does love look like?”

A few days later, we were blessed with one of the several counseling sessions experienced during missionary training. For two hours, the counselor, metaphorically speaking, kept bonking me on the head with a cardboard baton until finally, a light bulb went on. One of Duang’s love languages is seeing me make healthy choices. Restating the sentence to put the burden where it belongs, I can demonstrate my love to Duang by making healthy choices. That is one illustration of what love looks like.

Love is not a romantic feeling but a choice. Like faith, it is usually an action verb. I continue to pray that prayer and invite you to join me. Ask God to give you practical examples of what real love looks like. The world is dying to see it.

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