Love is More Than a Feeling

Tears were in Mary’s eyes as she walked through the mall. The jeweler had just informed her that a missing diamond in her ring would cost $400 to replace. It was such a major cost and the lost jewel had been part of her original wedding ring.

As she mournfully walked, she encountered a small lad, weeping and looking lost. She stopped and immediately reached out to him. She tried to comfort him. And then, shortly and happily, his big sister soon appeared looking for him.

Feeling miserable herself, Mary had nevertheless expressed important loving-kindness to the lost little boy. And that is an important fact of life.

When Jesus told his followers, and all of us, to love one another, he was not talking about warm feelings, emotional energy, or physical attraction. It was about attitudes and actions that lifted, encouraged, fixed, solved.

You see how Mary demonstrated that? What were her feelings? She was sad and mournful over the lost diamond, apprehensive about the cost of a replacement, distraught because this was about her original wedding ring. She was in no mood to be helpful or to be thinking about other people. She was wrapped up in her own problem.

And yet . . . she allowed herself to notice the little lost boy. She made the effort to comfort him. She showed kindness, not because she was in the mood to do that sort of thing, but because she made the decision to do it.

When Jesus called us to “love one another”, feelings and emotions were not likely part of His agenda. Loving feelings have become a major part of our love-consciousness. But love is so much bigger than our feelings.

We see that when we look at the life of Jesus.  There was so much distress, pain and suffering as He lived his life and died for us.  Loving kindness was a life-giving choice, not simply following feelings of compassion and sympathy—although that was clearly present in Jesus’ life also.

So we are called to thoughtfulness and awareness of the people and world around us. Action to meet needs follows. We may be busy with other things or hurting for some reason ourselves when we see and realize a need and move into helpfulness. Remember, love is more than a feeling.  Love is care and kindness in action that meets a need we know about.  And sometimes such helpfulness (love) removes or reduces our own pain.

A friend of mine told me something he was doing that is 100% fresh and original.  He said he is sending e-mail notes to L.A. Times writers, using the contact information at the end of many columns. What a beautiful way to do a surprisingly unique brand of loving-kindness.

The message that I want to emphasize and clarify is that you don’t have to have the feelings in order to take the actions. Mary certainly didn’t have warm, expansive feelings or a positive mood at the mall, but she did the right thing anyway. The man who writes notes to the newspaper columnists may not feel like doing it on a particular day, but he has undertaken the project anyway.