Every act done in love will live forever.
The earth and all its people are crying out for sustenance, and that is love. The bread of life. The living water. Divine love, given by God to us, to be distributed by us. The quiet desperation can only be filled in the giving and receiving of this power, the power that gave birth to the universe and continues to press deeper and deeper into the universe.
Here it is, something to hold on to. A simple thing that demands all of us, that asks us to die and be reborn.
The gap in the mysteries surrounding us can only be explained and filled by this love, and what greater love hath he than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends, Christ, the embodiment of love, love in a person, as a person.
And it was his act done in love -- to lay down his life for his friends who are you and I -- that lives forever. That cannot be conquered. Love is the answer to mysteries we seek, love lives on forever, and the tomb into which a dead body is placed will see that body come back to life, unable to be conquered by the rules of life and death; love lives outside them. Love is more powerful.
And this is where I am struggling to understand. The universe is built upon order - a perfect order that keeps us upright, that allows our lungs to breathe without thinking, order that turns a seed into a seedling, and the seedling into a tree, and the tree that gives fruit filled with seeds to be planted again. Order. Order that holds the moon in the sky. Order that allows men to build a rocket to visit the moon, the mathematics precisely arranged so the rocket doesn’t explode, order.
In us, holding us up.
But there is also the mystery. The same order that sees us born and live and then die and return to the earth is overcome by what we cannot fully understand, love that goes on throughout eternity, love that brings us back to life. For this we need faith. The things we cannot see and cannot understand, but isn’t that ok? Isn’t it wonderful that the order is paired with the mystery, and the ordered mind can wonder upon the machinations of life and death and be perplexed and fascinated by what God has woven through us and around us . . .
Love endures forever.
But every act done with the absence of love is temporary - it cannot endure.
We’re obsessed with prolonging life - of staying here a little longer and trying to figure this out - when it is not us but what we do that remains after we have moved on, after we have entered the strangeland of death. What we do in love continues without us.
The same is true with what we create. If we create something in the absence of love - a book or a song or a relationship - then that has the singular fate of being temporary. Death will come for all that is not born in love.
So let us live as sons, let us live as daughters, let us press and infuse the world around us in the love that we have come to know through Christ. That is our choice today. That is our choice every day. To live in love, or to live in hell. To make in love, or to make in hell.
To speak in love, or to speak in hell.
Because time is fulfilled and the kingdom is at hand.