Love is both pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. It has long been held that what you can love, can hurt you, in almost equal reciprocity. The more you love, the more you can get hurt. The more you love, the more you stand to lose.
Yet the point of love is not to clam up, to refrain from ever loving. Each and every person has the potential to love so deeply, so strongly, with such passion and intimacy, with romance, and to receive back the joy of that same love. The truth is, the joy of love is so much greater than joy that can be derived elsewhere.
Money does not give joy. Material wealth does not give joy. It gives convenience, yet often takes away love. How many rich people seek so hard and far for love, yet never find it. Sex does not give joy, unless it is enjoyed as a part of love. Loveless sex would make one feel as empty as a broken earthernware pot.
Love is given to be reciprocated, because in that reciprocity lies its joy and pleasure. If you love someone who does not love you back, you will know sorrow, sadness, perhaps anger and frustration.( Think now of how the Lord God would feel.) Yet if you love, and have that love given back, you would bask in that light, and feel the immense value of love.
Yet in all the love we hold, we must never lose that child-like innocence that God granted us when we were born. Through life, we may love deeply, and often be hurt with rejection, feel sorrow and anger. But never be afraid to love, because only then can we find the one true love of a lifetime.
Love is more than that. It is trust and belief, flavoured with romance and passion and intimacy, tempered with time experience and wisdom, and left to stew, ages well with time to taste of a fine bouquet that never runs dry.
