Love is just a word I heard . . .

So what is love? A pink valentine heart, or a ring from Kay Jewelers?

Does love mean “never having to say you’re sorry?”

Looking back on the songs, slogans and stories that papered my path to adulthood, I’d say there’s plenty of confusion about what love is, and how it’s shown. Free love? Make love not war?

No surprise that we carry the hope that love will be easy, convenient, and always make us feel good. Yet, a quick scan through the gospels tells a different story: Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

We’ve all heard the chapter from 1 Corinthians: “love is patient, love is kind . . .” Ah, and we’ve been instructed to insert our own names in place of love: “Carol is patient, Carol is kind.” Well, maybe. Some days.

Love has a cost. Even when it comes to loving our kids, our spouses, our parents, our friends. Would you lay down your life for me?

But the cost that comes to mind, for me, is more immediate, more pressing, more to the point: Would you give me an hour? Ten minutes? Five?

Weave us together

There’s a song we sang in girl scouting – a prayer, really, sung while standing in a circle, with arms weaving forward and back:

– Weave, weave, weave us together, weave us together in unity and love,
– Weave, weave, weave us together, together in love.

That prayer is needed more than ever, yet we have few places where we can ask, or even imagine, that kind of weaving taking place.

The Kaiser Family Foundation just documented the use of technology in our teens’ lives, and other reports demonstrate the growing isolation of both adults and teens. (One frequently cited study was done by Duke University in 2006 ).

From my own vantage point, as a youth pastor, parent, friend to many families in distress, our current culture does much to pull both youth and parents into ever more self-determined paths. Points of intersection, for families, friends, church communities, neighbors, are less frequent, less potent, less of a priority, as other demands become increasingly insistent. I'm sometimes reminded of the sobering poem by William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Kids can't hear parents, parents can't hear kids. Families seem to lack a center, a place of focus, and spin into dissolution.