Why do we love?

It’s a question that has long vexed so very many people.

Why do we love?

We cannot help it, or better put, we cannot help but crave it, because we need it.

And when we don’t receive it, the absence of it rips our guts out, it kicks us where it hurts, it harms us more than we can ever describe.

The heights of love, the depths of it, its breadth and width, is unfathomable, in terms of what it gives when we have it, as much as what it takes away when we don’t have it.

Nothing else in life matters other than love, it is the thing that makes and breaks our lives.  And the greatest paradox of all is love and grief are just different sides of the same coin.

There is pain because of loss, and we all experience loss because of love, because we have either been deprived of love, or in loss deprivation occurs.

When all that matters is weighed up, and all that is counted is either significant or it isn’t, what remains as significant is love, and everything that isn’t significant has no part in love.

The best way of grounding love is family, is kin, is clan, is mob.  If ever we desire to touch someone we talk about family, and family always reduces us to the humanity we all bear.

Think about the concept of reconciliation, of a father to a son, a daughter to a mother, brother to brother and sister to sister.  The emotions involved in such a process and event are incalculable, completely beyond both measurement and description.  But it’s the same concept when brokenness pervades.

We love because we cannot help loving, needing love, surviving by love.

The hardest way for a person to suffer in this life is to go without love.  That dearth of positive emotion is like a dagger to the heart.  No human being can survive let alone prosper without love, and yet there are so many who endure that living death without love.

And still there is something in the human spirit that refuses to give up on love, for those who do give up it is such a brutal trauma that the harmed become harmful.

If we do not love, meaning that we turn our back on it, we only harm ourselves, in the inevitable harming of others.  Nobody can refuse love and prosper, and indeed the reverse occurs.

All children need love, and because we are all children, it is apparent that we need it copiously.  Try depriving one human being of the love that they need.  Such a process is a crime, and not simply against that human being, but against all human beings that come in contact with that human being.

Inevitably every human being is harmed because no human being has been perfectly loved.  And the only recourse for every human being is to find a way of forgiving the harm that has been caused, because if there is no forgiveness there is no way the human being can love or be loved.

Forgiveness is like a gate for love, and unless the gate is open, love is inhibited.  Forgiveness opens the gate of love, and in the receiving and giving there is a prospering, not simply for the person forgiving, but for everyone they’re in contact with.

Love, therefore, is freedom, and yet there are so many people who are not free, because they do not love or cannot love or do not have access to love.  It is not simply about the desire to want to be loved, and if it was simply about the desire more would walk directly in that way.

The desire to want to be loved must be matched by the receipt of love.  In other words, a person must experience what it is like to be loved to understand that the desire to want to be loved is right and such an appropriate and irrepressible desire.

Love is not an offer that anyone can refuse.  No one turns their back on love and survives to tell the story.  To refuse love is to commit a crime against oneself.

It’s like trying to understand how people can abuse others, how people can wantonly commit harms against others that seem unconscionable from the viewpoint of love and simple existence.  Nobody can embody love and produce harm.  Love and harm do not coexist.

Why do we love?  We love because we are wired that way.  We love because God first loved us.  That’s the true truth.  It cannot be any other way, and the simplest evidence of such an audacious fact is that none of us can escape the need of love.

Why do we love?  We love because we cannot survive without it.  Everything of life that works well is because of love, and everything that doesn’t is because of a lack of love.