Love

What does love look like to us? Does it appear to come easy or do we have to work at it? Does love consists of the enabling of our whole being or do we love half heartedly? Do we give ourselves up fully to others and count them as higher than ourselves? Do we love those who we may not know or do we love those who do us wrong?
I think that if I was to answer these questions with complete honesty the end result would be sad. I do not always love people with the perfect love of Christ. I feel like for the most part I fall short of this for the mere fact that I’m not sure what His perfect love looks like, and if I do not have this perfect love already in my heart how do I expect to give it away to anyone? Also I feel that sometimes I’m just not open to loving others the way Christ calls me too. I think Christ is longing to show me the beauty of who people really are but I have to allow Him to work in my life. I will never be able to see the inter beauty of people through my own eyes; I have to see them through the eyes of Jesus.
The beauty of this dilemma is that Christ tells us what His perfect love looks like. He tells us in 1 Corinthians 13.
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbol. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind, love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues; they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but than face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
God is teaching me day by day how to love all those who cross my path. It does not matter how I truly feel about them because God created them perfect in His glory. He created each individual with an overwhelming beauty. We may not see what Christ sees but He calls us to search for the inner beauty that each person holds. We may not understand the things people do or the logic behind their actions but Christ will use each situation for His glory.
I pray that Christ will take my heart and transform it; that it may abound with unfailing, unyielding love. This is a love that by no means will I ever be able to attain; it is a love that Christ will have to pour into my life each moment of each day.