What language do you speak?

"Thankfulness is not some sort of magic formula; it is the language of Love..."  (p. 341, Jesus Calling, Sarah Young)

What language do you speak?  I often speak the language of frustration.  I've even been known to be bilingual.  I can speak anger and condemnation with ease.  Watch your language.  It reveals where you have been living, the color of your heart, and the origin of your roots.

It's not always what you do, it can be what you don't do that matters

Someone said, "Love's greatest triumph is not always in what love does but - more often than not - in what love refrains from doing."  I don't know who said it.  But, it is a good reminder.  We are what we do, and what we chose not to do ~ even though we could...

The Opposite of Love

Billy Graham posed:

"What is the opposite of love?  It isn't hate (although it may take that form).  The opposite of love is selfishness."  (from Wisdom for Each Day)

Always Learning New Ways to Show Love

Willing to Love

"In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will.  When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling....On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone.  Thus in Jesus' terms we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them.  In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends...This does not mean that liking may not be a part of loving, only that it doesn't have to be.  Sometimes liking follows on the heels of loving."

Powerful & Powerless

"Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless."

Frederick Buechner, p. 242, Listening To Your Life

3 stages of Love

Frederick Buechner describes 3 stages for love:

"The first stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love.  The middle sage is to believe that there are many kinds of love and that the Greeks had a different word for each of them.  The last stage is to believe that there is only kind of love."

He concludes:  "To lose yourself in such ways is to find yourself.   Is what it's all about.  Is what love is."

(p. 241, Listening to your Life)