Love Isn’t a Feeling, But We Feel It

Love isn’t a feeling, but we feel it.

Sometimes with a smile, a blush, and a racing heart. Sometimes with a tear as we grieve a loved one’s death.

We feel it beyond the milestone moments, mindlessly saying it back to the person we just feel so comfortable with we’ve lost track of the weight of the words. Love can feel like gratitude for a dinner you didn’t cook, or relief after an argument about the garbage disposal (again), when those three words are followed by these: I forgive you.

Frustration is the way love feels when they hurt and we can’t help them. Disappointment can be a love that feels they could do better, and joy, a love that celebrates when they do. Sometimes it feels like a gentle grin, a flushed face, and a pounding heart when love requires hard truth.

So love isn’t a feeling, but a thousand of them, defined by an aim at one constant: the good of our beloved.

Seeing love in that light helps us make sense of who God is and the kind of love He calls us to.

“God is love” (1 John 4:16).

God is infinitely complex. In His nature, His emotions, His interactions. And He is constant in His purpose: the good of His beloved.

Love prompted His promise to redeem us when sin started. It carried through to when love was “made manifest among us”*, when Jesus came… and felt love with tears and smiles and frustration, in all the thousand ways we do.

His love sought our good all the way to the cross, not because we earned it or wanted it, “not that we have loved God but that He loved us.”*

We are not so constant in our love, and that worries us sometimes. We question our hearts, because we know love isn’t a feeling, but there are a thousand ways we feel it. And can that be right?

But we who have “come to know and believe the love that God has for us,” have His Spirit. So we abide in Him, and He in us. And “we love because He first loved us.”*

There’s our assurance. Whatever love feels like for us at this moment, and all the other moments, there’s a greater love at work in us and through us. His love is perfect, and “perfect love casts out fear.”

*inspired by 1 John 4

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