All That Matters: Love, Life and Heart...

 Also in the "Weekend" issue of Free Press, Indore (12.02.2012)

Have you ever reflected on the relationship between heart, love and life? What is their importance to each other if any? They are inseparable three vital realities of human life and existence. One cannot exist without the other two. If there is no heart, you have neither love nor life because both love and life spring and come from heart. If you have no love, the life and heart are meaningless and a human being is as good a walking corpse. Even if you do wonders, perform great miracles and change the whole world but if you have no love within, it is all in vain. And furthermore, if you have no life, the heart and love cannot exist. Thus these three things, Love, heart and life are three angles of same triangle. If one of them is missing, the other two also disappear or lose their purpose.

            All these three have God as their ultimate source of existence, because it is God who gives life, and it is God’s love that dwells within and fills our hearts and the whole world. The most important among these three is love, because it is the binding force for the other two. You have life because your heart beats and your heart beats because it has love within. It is because of love that the world moves. It is love that changes and renews the face of the earth; that makes human life beautiful.

The very creation of the universe is the outcome and fruit of God’s love. In the Holy Bible we read when God had created everything and saw it, He liked it and said, “Everything is good.” Liking something is synonymous to loving something. So when we say God likes us that means and implies that God loves us and the whole creation. Everything is filled with God’s love; the whole creation exists in God’s love. It is because of this basic nature that creatures express their love for one another. We, human beings, are rational beings hence able to express our love in more creative ways than other creatures of lesser rational nature.

The highest expression of love of one human being towards others is even to trade it with life. Since love, heart and life are all equal hence one thing can be given for the other. There can be no greater expression of love than to go to the extent of giving one’s life for the other. This is what Jesus taught and did. He, being God himself, died for human beings that are just one dimension of His beautiful creation. Jesus is the True expression of God’s unconditional and unreserved love for human beings. It is through giving our life for others that we get life.

The dwelling place of love, the heart starts beating even before a human being takes a proper shape in the womb. And even before the heart starts beating, it is the love between a man and woman in marital context that gives existence to another new life. Sex in the marital context is the highest expression of love by the spouses towards each other. And children born out of this union are the fruits of that mutual love of the man and woman. When a new human being is born it is love that fosters his/her life in a healthy manner. Without love a human being cannot grow as a proper human being.

Today love is the most misunderstood and misused concept. Love is most often confused with many other similar feelings such as liking, lust, infatuation etc. When one likes something or somebody, s/he calls it love, and claim that ‘I love it’ or ‘I love him/her.’ When one wants to possess something or somebody and always be around them, it is not love it is lust. To understand what TRUE LOVE is, one must read Bible. It is the touching Love Story of God and the World. It says and shows what true love is. Just to give a short passage about love from Bible: it says, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way (it is not selfish); it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things. Love never ends; love never fails (1Cor. 13:4-7).”