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Is Love an emotion or an action?

Is Love an emotion or an action?

Last updated on: April 27, 2017 at 3:45 pm by John O'Keefe

Is Love an emotion or an action? 2017-04-27T15:45:30-05:00 John O'Keefe

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TNJ-2017-3 Yes.

It’s really is simple, love is both.

At this point I can stop writing.

I know, I need to explain what I mean.

In general, many conservative pastors I’ve heard over the past few years don’t like to see love as an emotion; to them, emotions are messy. Their right; emotions are messy. We, as followers, need to be messy; our communities of faith need to be messy. Yes, just so you know, messy is dangerous, and yes, our communities of faith need to be dangerous places.

Emotions are natural; they;re also instinctive, and intuitive. They’re central to a healthy state of mind. Many in the conservative conversation rightly separate emotions from reason, and knowledge. But love isn’t found in reason, or knowledge. The emotion of love brings to life a passion for others [passion is messy]. Passion is important; remember “God so loved the world” speaks boldly of the Divine’s passion for us.

The passion behind love, should drive our compassion [another messy emotion]. When we meet someone for the first time, we need to be open to falling in love with them; no matter who they are. Because when we do, we’re willing to go to the extreme, get messy, helping them. If not, if we only see love as an emotionless, reasonable, expression, we miss the passion of loving others. When we miss the passion of love, our acts of love are trapped in an emotionless state. We base our actions of love on logical, metered, meaningless expressions where we’ll never meet the needs of others; because our empathy [messy] for others is closed. When we express love as an emotion, a passion, we naturally move forward in action to show how love changed us, and can change others. When we love, we care about others, we strive to find ways to help, we develop a life view centering on the desire to see others happy.

When we express the emotion of love, there is a chance [a very good chance] we will get hurt. But, that’s a chance we must be willing to take. Here are something I believe happen when we approach others with the emotion of love:

We look past faults, quirks, and issues
We give more, and take less
We place no strings on the relationship
We strive to see the world through their eyes
We don’t seek to blame, or exclude
We understand we will see things differently
We value their life
We are willing to be vulnerable
We seek to respect
We apologize, we seek forgiveness, we give forgiveness
We strive to say ‘yes,’ more than we say, ‘no’
We look inward to the heart of others

We are willing to get messy, and live dangerously

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