peace . love . joy

What exactly is love?
What does it feel like? How do you display it?

Recently, I've been questioning myself and my relationship with God.
Why is it that I stray from Him so quickly and so frequently these past few weeks?
Why is it that when I do, I feel guilty and miserable?
If such an act makes me feel bad, and if I love God, shouldn't I want to be with Him and not get distracted so easily?
But since I apparently prefer doing other things than spending time with Him, as much I can, whenever I can, does it mean that I don't love God?

That led me to put my relationship with my family on the hot seat:
Assuming I love them, every one of the five of them, am I showing that I love them?
Why do I love them?
Because as much as I can gather, there was never a "why" in this love equation. I just love them. They're my family and I love them. But then, if they were someone else, if they weren't family, would I still love them? In that case, does that love equal a feeble blood tie? If so, it's a weak association.. or is it?

These sentiments and questions increasingly crowded my mind in the days leading up to our Scotland visit. My family had come up to the UK on my request, and we were going to travel to Scotland together.

And in the day just before we left, I opened my quiet time materials and the closing instruction was for me to lay a question at God's feet, something that's been bothering me, but just bringing it up to God, not demanding an answer from Him.
But what do you know, God chose to answer there and then:
He told me that I will be shown what love is during our Scotland getaway.
So all I asked was for me to keep my eyes and ears and heart peeled for the answer that I really needed to know. That's it.

What is love?

It came in a long and drawn out reply.

Our mode of transport was purely trains. We took a train ride from London Kings Cross to Edinburgh Haymarket, from Haymarket to Mallaig, from Mallaig to Fort William, from Fort William to Haymarket, from Haymarket to Edinburgh Waverly, and finally the Caledonian Sleeper from Waverly to London Euston.

And all the time, looking out the window, I'd see landscape after landscape, sometimes bare greens of ferns and coniferous trees, sometimes the vast highlands giving way to lakes and trickling streams and rivers. Occassionally, we'd come across a house or two dotting the scenary. Cows, sheep, rabbits, birds contributed the only animated movement in the stillness of earth and sky. Colourful flowers decorated the land, and full clouds interrupted the clear blue heavens. Beautiful, majestic and sublime. It was then I realised and really understood why the Romantic painters like Constable, Palmer and Turner loved landscapes. I could see the paintings, not super-imposed, but in the actual vision of Scotland itself. I know why they placed nature on an elevated pedestal, treating it with some sort of religious agenda, stopping shy of calling it "god". Their paintings were in essence a worship of nature, of God's creation.

I loved what I saw.

But when the trains stopped, ceasing all individual private meditation on the sacred feast for the senses, human interaction began. And those of you who know my family, know we tend to irritate one another. If we're in a foul mood, the phrase "misery loves company" aptly applies. Sometimes, some of us even search for opportunities to get upset. Walking the tightrope between being "true to yourself", no matter how much you've changed as a person, and being patient, self-controlled and obedient to your parents is no easy feat. And so far, I think I can claim the victor's crown on one occassion out of the multiple countless times the situation called for such an exercise of character!

And that's when it hit me.

Someone once told me that love is a choice.
It was new to me then, and it is still new to me now.

Love is a choice.
A decision to be patient, self-controlled, honouring to another who you think deserves it not.
An immovable stone in difficult and raging white water.
A perseverence.

It's so easy to love something so beautiful, something that can't talk back; can't react, something that just lies there and lets your hungry senses undress it.
But it's ever so difficult to love something that is not beautiful at that very moment, something intelligent that retorts; that responds, something that is animated and has its own ideas.

So far, I think I haven't mastered the act of loving my family.
But I do hope to do so one day. And I hope that day approaches soon. Because I don't like what an impatient, impulsive and argumentative person I've become especially when dealing with my family.

It makes me think about God, and how He has loved me.

It is difficult perhaps, to love God: Him being wild and untamable, an animated being that responds and replies, an intelligent entity with His own will. C. S. Lewis hit the nail on the head likening God to a wild lion.

I hope to love Him as much I did, no, more than before. To show Him I do love Him.

As to the question of why I love Him, why I love my family.. There is no answer. I just do. Perhaps the reasons, while unclear to me now, are feeble and pathetic. But for now, they'll have to do, whatever they are. I don't think I'll ever find an answer to that question, one answer that pleases and satisfies me.

But the assumption that I love God, and I love my family holds true for me.

All the same, a hope is merely a hope: a sentence of words strung together. A glimmer in the distance.

It'll take a heck of an effort on my part to lift my feet and make them walk towards that glimmer.

But until the cows come home, until the sun implodes, until the day of Judgement, may I be found walking and reaching towards that hope!