True Love

Did you ever watch an old man as his grandchild walks up to greet him? It's quite an experience: He has arthritis, diabetes and high-cholesterol – it hurts him just to get up from his seat – yet his eyes light up with joy as he greets the child. Watch as he gingerly takes the child up in his arms and they gently hug each other. Notice the amount of time and attention that the child commands. Grandparents can spend hours with their grandchildren, always happy to chat about nothing in particular, so excited when the child asks a question or wants to learn something that the grandparent is able to help with.

What about bad behavior? Well, it is certainly annoying, but not really a problem; grandparents quickly forgive and forget.

Each grandchild is different. The grandparents get to know them well and see both their strengths and their weaknesses. Each child is a precious work-in-progress with unlimited potential. The grandparents remember the times when they gave up on their children. They won't make that mistake again with their grandchildren.

This must be true love.

Grandfather is easily exhausted and he has pain and weakness in his body; yet he wants to spend all the time he can with his grandchild. Children immediately recognize the immense value of true love. If it’s not true love, they’re not interested. They know love when they see it and they’re always excited about it.

Cynical people have long lists of wrong explanations for this, but experience in life can teach us the truth: True love comes from God through the power of His spirit in our lives. He wants us to love each other and He fills our hearts with a deep and wonderful joy when we serve one another. Adults are blinded by their many worries, but young children and the elderly know where the real priorities are: They want to be with one another, to care for one another and to serve one another. They desperately want God to fill their hearts with His great joy – so they take advantage of every opportunity to do what pleases Him.

Do you have lots of ideas in your head about love? Do you wonder what it is and where you’ll find it? Take the time to measure your ideas and opinions against the example of the Grandfather and his grandchildren. Do your ideas fit this example?

Most people will find that their ideas don’t fit at all – which is not a good thing; but it’s understandable. Plenty of people in this world are noticing every day that the media is working hard to turn right into wrong and wrong into right. Even the words we use in everyday speech are becoming more illogical and people are forgetting what the words are supposed to mean. Many people don’t realize that what they believe and what they say is often irrational.

So, how do you find the truth? Well, it’s a good start if you make a deliberate and sincere effort to find it.

True love, once you’ve had the experience of it, is so wonderful that you will work hard to find more of it, understand it better and incorporate everything about it into your daily life. With a bit of effort, we can fill our lives with true love without having to wait until we have grandchildren!

What is Love?

Many people, when they hold a baby in their arms, find that they have a certain feeling in their hearts. They think that this feeling is what love is. To be more precise about this feeling and what it means, we need to look more carefully at the difference between happiness and joy:

Happiness

Happiness is something that we teach ourselves to do. This begins early in life:

Little babies, when they’re born, do not know how to suck milk from their mothers’ breast. The mother places the newborns’ mouth up against her nipple, but the newborn has no idea what to do. There are a huge number of nerve endings in his mouth, though, so the baby reflexively wants to play with anything that comes near his mouth. When he puts the nipple into his mouth he reflexively sucks on it and some milk comes out. This feels good! So, he does it again! Within a short time, he learns that he can get some pleasure in his life by sucking milk into his mouth.

Pleasure is the simple stimulation of the nervous system. Food is easily the most powerful pleasure in our lives – we begin to feel good about food immediately after birth and we continue to incorporate it into our activities throughout our lives.

After a while, a newborn discovers another pleasure: Waste will collect in the baby and make him feel bad. He doesn’t know why he feels this way; he just knows he’s not happy. At some point, another reflex kicks in: A muscle contraction causes him to evacuate some of the waste that’s been in his system for too long. Due to a large number of nerve endings in his back-end, this feels good! So, he does it again!

Throughout our lives, we continue to discover new pleasures, new ways to stimulate our nervous system, and we desire to practice this often. We learn, by habit, to feel good when we do things that bring us closer to pleasure. This good feeling that we get comes from our own minds and bodies. We practice feeling good under certain conditions and we learn, over a long period of time, to repeat this feeling.

In addition, certain activities cause the release of natural substances into our bodies. For example, endorphins produced by the pituitary gland are released into our minds when we smile for extended periods of time. This helps us to practice and learn to get high on life by doing the things we’re supposed to be doing.

We call this a Happy feeling, a feeling of Happiness.

Joy

Joy is very different from happiness.

Joy is often more intense than happiness. It is far more intense than, for example, getting high on drugs. Unlike most highs, Joy lasts a long time – months, years or even a lifetime.

You can immediately notice that there’s something different about somebody who has a great deal of joy in his life: He accomplishes far more than most people do, he is more fun to be with, he seems to be brighter than other people and he seems to be able to deal with everything more effectively.

Joy is a gift from God. Only He can fill your heart with it – you can’t buy it, there are no pills that you can get it from, nobody can give it to you except our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

If you want Joy in your life there is only one way to get it: Make sure you do things that please Him. What pleases Him? Well, that’s a big subject – you should ask Him about it yourself to make sure you get a good answer.

As we’re focusing here on finding love in our lives – which most people interpret to mean love in our relationships with others – we’ll focus on a basic type of activity that is well known to be pleasing to God: Serving others.

In the scriptures, we are asked to care about others, to do good things for them and not to ask for anything in return.

Remembering the example of grandfathers and their grandchildren: we see that this is what they are doing. Children don’t have much to offer their grandparents, yet grandparents feel such joy when they serve their grandchildren. We learn that there are three components here that we generally refer to as Love:

• The grandparents are actually doing things for their grandchildren. These include simple things like smiling, more complicated things like preparing food to eat and much more complicated things like helping with life’s problems. In our spoken language, we refer to these activities as “acts of Love,” and, in fact, we learn from this and other examples that true love is something that we do for others.
• There is a feeling of satisfaction that the grandparents will have when they do good things. This is a learned reaction, something that we give to ourselves. It is a basic form of happiness that we have taught ourselves, by habit, to feel.
• There is a feeling of joy that the grandparents will get as a gift from God. This is the feeling that should be associated with Love.