Happy 2009! Welcome to my blog, whether you are a new reader or old. My posting has been very light as of late, for reasons I outlined in a previous post, but I feel like I have a mandate in my spirit now to jump-start Finite Calls Infinite for the new year and get back into the swing of things. I’ve been learning a lot (stumbling a lot!) and growing a lot in the past couple of months, and one of the things I’ve discovered is that I still don’t understand very much about something that seems to be somewhat of a mystery to everybody else as well.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about Love, of course. To quote the 80′s hit song by Howard Jones:

What is love anyway, does anybody love anybody anyway

Now let me back up a second. Most of the time when people are talking about love in pop culture, they’re referring to a pale imitation of the real thing. Not only that, but it’s a corrupted form of only one aspect of love — romance — that has little awareness of the deeper nature of love; of sacrifice, of humility, of mercy, of genuine compassion. Love, ultimately, contains within it an element of death — you die to yourself in order to live for another. But most people don’t want to die, which is why true love is a rarity.

So, as Howard Jones asks, what is love anyway? How should we love, and can we even truly love in the right way? Perhaps love is indeed a mystery, and there’s no telling how deep one can go or how far one still has to go to plumb its sacred depths. I’m sure that’s close to the truth, but I believe we can gain a certain level of insight or understanding of love’s basic principles, which is why I am embarking on a new series called Love Jam. Like good Jazz, learning to love is a bit like improvising on a theme. As my starting theme, I will be using the attributes of love that the Apostle Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. From there on out, whatever comes to mind as I meditate and “improvise” on that theme, I will blog over a period of about a couple of months or so.

Interestingly enough, I’ve never read any commentary on this famous passage of Scripture. I may be one of the few Christians out there who hasn’t! So this will be fun for me. I hope you receive something useful from my explorations as well.

So, without further adieu, here is the theme. I will start again from the top in my next post. Enjoy!

Love is patient.
Love is kind.
Love does not envy or boast.
Love is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way.
Love is not irritable or resentful.
Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never fails.