LoveMay 14, 2015“I love macaroni and cheese” What is the difference between my love for mac and cheese and my love for my wife? Or what is the difference between her love of a new hair do and her love for me? I long to find the difference. A while back I can remember a Pastor giving a sermon on love. He said there were three types of love Agape, Philos, and Eros. This seemed so wonderful to me. I would now have the ability to love in degrees. All love was not the same. Philos is brotherly love or the love we have for friends and family. Eros is romantic love, the love we have for a partner. A dynamic physical love. Agape is unconditional love. GOD like live. An irrevocable love. The degrees did not help. Agape is unattainable as we are made up of GOD we are not GOD like and can therefore not achieve an unconditional love. Eros is a love that only one can share and yet the love I have for my wife is more than just an erotic love. I don’t covet her only for her beauty, her looks, her physical. And Eros does not cover what I feel for my children. And what I feel for my children goes far beyond Philos. Philos, my friends and my extended family fall squarely in this category. With every relationship I have had it irked me to share my love with new shoes, a movie, some stranger in a movie who happened to say some witty line or the weather. Even with my growing distain for the use of the word love I learned how to love beyond Philos and Eros. I learned to stop using Love to describe how I feel about a pair of shoes or the smell of barbecue. I searched for a new word to let my wife know that what I had for her, what I felt for her was something that no other could conjure in me. For years we would say to each other “You complete me” which became trivial when we heard the leads in movie say it to each other. It also became cumbersome to wield. My wife reverted back to “I love you”. And I reverted back to not feeling special in receipt of her love. I found myself not wanting to speak the word. Not that I didn’t love my wife, but that I wanted to love her more deeply more purposefully. In the past year I found a new word. I created a new word for the way I wanted my love received. “ILYSM” (pronounced ee- lee - sim) the spoken acronym of I love you so much. And yet upon finding that it was not enough because what I really mean to say is “I love you completely”. “ILYC (ee - lick) is that any more cumbersome than latin? I will discard ILYSM and reserve it for use with my children. As I explain this I wonder how much the average person considers to what degree they love? Does it really matter? Well, Yes. I long to be loved not like a pastrami sandwich or a Lamborghini. I long to be loved for me. I long to be loved and to love in a divine purposeful way. Dreamcatcher BF |
