from the book: Choosing the abundant Life, by GLH
The most wonderful gift of life is to love and to be loved. God created us to love and to be loved because it is in loving that we find the true meaning of completion. When you can get past that point of selfish expectation, then you will experience what true mercy and compassion is all about. Love is the solution to all things good, righteous, and holy. There is never anything harmful found in love; it always seeks to forgive, bind up, and restore.
Love is eager to meet the needs of others, to unselfishly give of all it possesses and then work to provide more, to provide what is needed. It is passion in its purest form, compassion without an end and desires to always be found sufficient and needed. To understand God, you must first be able to love and to love without condition. Understand, there is no way that you will ever be able to meet the high standard set by a super-natural, all-powerful God. Giving Him your heart and allowing Him to work in your life will bring you to a point where you will willingly allow Him to work in and through you. Knowing that you are loved by the one who is worthy of all love and that you can do nothing to deserve that love produces the highest level of respect and reverence. When you have reached a point where love controls everything that you do, then life is not what is most important and you become willing to sacrifice that life to see that those you love are provided for. This, in and of itself, might seem foolish and destructive, but there is no greater feeling than that of loving; there is no greater good than to sacrifice for another. True love has no end, and if we allow ourselves to become a part of that love, we are guaranteed eternal life. If you wonder how anyone could ever love so much, then you have never truly loved. A life that has been taken to a point of loving unconditionally will never be the same as it was before it reached that point. There’s no going back; there’s no forgetting that it happened. The pinnacle of joy in living is living in the realm of unconditional love. To be at your best, you need to love; to know the true meaning of life, you need to love; and to experience true joy and fulfillment, you need to love. True love is undeniably the expression of sacrificial lavishness, the final crown to all that is to be desired and possessed.