Love is... (I Cor. 13:4-8)

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. ...

One of Pastor Leung's sermons reminds us that we shall do all things out of love, no matter to serve God or to serve people. If we do things not for the purpose of love, we will neither be able to overcome the difficulties, nor will we be able to keep it up. This is one of my vulnerabilities. For God, I am more to admire and fear than to love; for people, I love myself more than love others. Therefore I did a prayer and asked God to teach me how to love, love Him and love others.

But love is an abstract term. How? Today I read these verses. Of course, they are not strange to me. But reading them again did prompt me a few ways of how to act out love. They are the conducts after the word, "not", meaning not to do something. It may be difficult to do something, because you need motivation and courage. But not to do something may be a little bit easier.

So let me practise how to love beginning with not-to. Firstly I need to raise my alert level, every time when I realize that I am do something that falls into the not-to-do-categories, I shall stop immediately. Hopefully I can get rid of the bad habits bit by bit. Then I can continue on with the to-do. The bedrock is to keep God's love definition in my heart so that my alert level can stay high at all time.

Julia