A funny thing about loving people that I recently started thinking about is that not everyone will respond in kind. Not too long ago, I was trying to be intentional about loving and being caring towards some people in my life. Maybe I was being awkward about it, but their responses were pretty dismissive in an off putting way, and I was slightly taken aback. I guess I was expecting to feel the love back at me. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, right?
At one point, I was griping about it to God, and He responded with a very simple line from 1 Corinthians 13:5:
Love is not self-seeking.
What He meant, in my interpretation, was that love is not a means to get or achieve something from someone.
There’s a scene in a movie where a mother asks her daughter “Do you love him?” The daughter said “I care more to be loved. I want to be loved”, to which the mother responded, “That is not the same thing as loving.”
This reminded me of Romans 8:12, which says,
Love must be sincere.
Love is, or at least should be, unconditional. If people act a certain way in order to get a certain outcome out of somebody, that’s closer to manipulation than love. Love – putting others before yourself, showing care – is supposed to,
Bear all things, believe all things, hope in all things and endures all things.
1 Corinthians 13:7
If it feels pointless to love people who don’t love back, maybe our idea of love needs to be rethought. Jesus was a prime example of loving people who didn’t love him back.
I feel that the Lord is leading me to grow in love, and maybe’s He’s leading you to it too. My prayer is that we love, not out of own strength or ideas of love, but out of God’s abundant, lavish, unconditional love for us. It may not feel good or logical, but hey, that the example He shows us everyday.