The Ambiguity Of Love

What do you mean when you say love? Love is probably the most ambiguous word in the English language. It has so many different meanings depending on the context of its usage and who or what it is spoken of. In fact, it is so personal that just about everyone has their own definition of what love is to them. If not their own definition, their own understanding of what love is.

Each of us uses the same word to describe how we feel about certain foods, our spouse, our children, our family in general, our friends, colors, smells, sounds, textures, feelings, etc... You name it someone might say they love it. Each of us have an understanding that just because you love lasagna you are not going to marry it. Although, a good lasagna may deserve consideration to such a serious commitment ;) We also understand that when we say we love our friends or neighbors we do not love them the same way we love our children or our spouse. We may have feelings for a pair of shoes, but we, for the most part, understand that the feeling we feel towards our shoes is different than the feeling we feel for a friend.

When we speak of the Language of Love, it would indeed seem that love has it's own language and the words don't matter so much as the feelings placed in the words and the actions that follow. Although love can be written and some may find creative ways to say it, words just never seem enough. Maybe because love can not be fully expressed in words alone, and it is the actions that follow the words that truly define what we are saying. It is in the actions that we find whether someone truly understands what love is, and what we mean when we say that we love them. That is true when we say it to our children, our spouse, or our friends. It is the actions that we take that define the meaning of our words, and the level of our commitment.

The greater our understanding of God's plan of happiness the greater capacity we will have to love, and the closer we will come to defining what pure love truly is.

Love may well be the most ambiguous word in the English language, but if we as individuals do not define it with confidence, we may find ourselves questioning with regularity just what the heck this thing called love is? where do we find it? And how do we keep it once we have found it?