All We Need Is...

 It's the catch-all word that spans our relationship with lasagna to our relationship with a dog or guinea pig, to our relationship with our life-long, thick-and-thin, for-better-or-for-worse, sickness-and-health spouse or a child. We use it to describe how we felt about a movie, old shoes, news sofa.

When we have it, we often take it for granted.  When we don't, life seems meaningless and not worth living.

It's the one thing every person you meet today (including the one that greets you in the mirror) needs as much (or more!) as their food and water. It always leaves it's undeniable, unmistakable mark on anything with do - cooking and cleaning,  pottery and parenting.

Without it...

Well, this is how Eugene Peterson in The Message describes it's absence in our lives:

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.

If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. 

So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

I Corinthians 13:1-3

No matter what I say...

No matter what I believe...

No matter what I do...

I am bankrupt

Without love.