Rediscovering love

Someone wrote to me yesterday, sharing that "So happy that something lost but found again!"

Yes indeed! I'm so excited the other day when I found an old favorite book, Lewis Smedes' Love Within Limits, which I thought I lost already, but is actually buried and hidden in my bookshelf. It was almost 20 years ago when I first read this book, I believed most of my belief and understanding of what Christian love should be, as described in I Corinthians 13, was shaped by it since then. When I began reading it, its first chapter on "Love is longsuffering（愛是恆久忍耐）" is immediately impressive and captured my attention and concentration on finishing the whole book right away. Here're highlights from this first chapter:

"[S]uffering is having to endure what we very much want not to endure.

"The paradox of longsuffering is that we must choose to suffer long. To suffer is to be a victim; to be longsuffering is in a sense to be free. To earn the description "longsuffering" we have to make a decision for what we do not want, choose to live indefinitely with what we hate. This is the paradox that makes longsuffering a creative art of living. We must be careful not to... turns a choice for suffering into a desire for suffering.... We are talking about... renewing over and over again our decision to accept what we desperately do not want and cannot change,... yet determining to live with it and rejoice in it.

"Long suffering is not passive. It is a tough, active, aggressive style of life.... The power to do this is agapic love.... Agapic love is the liberating power that moves us toward our neighbor with no demand for rewards.... Agape... is not driven by ardent need [and] it has power to wait. It gives power to accept life, to find goodness in living while we are victims of situations we despise.

"But suffering long is not the same as suffering endlessly. There come moments when suffering must stop.

"Love is your power to suffer longer than you think you can... Before you decide to stop suffering, make sure you have not lost contact with love."

Did you discover this: love never ask "How about you? How much did you suffer for me?" True love towards a person never ask for payback. True love is never self-centred.