Day 86

I have bronchitis. It is Tuesday, and I haven't run since Saturday morning. It's not the end of the world, but I am a little worried that it is going to be tough to start going again. But I can tell you that I have never been so thankful for healthy lungs as I am now that I know what it feels like to not be able to breathe. Seriously, yesterday I had to take 2-3 breaks every time I got up out of my chair. Unbelievable that some people live like that every day.

But all this inactivity has given me a lot of time to think, and I was reading my bible last night when I got this revelation on what love means, and it comes from 1 John 4. So the phrase in this passage, "God is love," is thrown around a lot, and to be honest, I have never understood it (not that I do fully now, but I'm a little closer). After doing a little digging, I noticed that in the bible, love is synonymous with self sacrifice. It is not an emotion, how I and I think a lot of people in our culture think of it. In fact, I am pretty sure that the culture the Jesus lived in was a relatively unemotional one in general. I mean, a man considered his wife and children as possessions, and those were his family. So this whole notion of love is completely based on actions and not emotion, and the whole bible demonstrates that the greatest action a person could do is to deny himself something to give to another. This is what love is. Love and self-sacrifice are one in the same; there cannot be one without the other.
In 1 John chapter 4, there is this step by step explanation of love, and it seems like it's an Idiot's Guide in simplicity, but without the understanding that love is an action and not an emotion, the significance is lost. The step-by-step goes something like this: We should love each other because God loves us. We can only love each other if we know God, though, because God has created/embodied/exemplified love ("God is love"). God loved us first, and that's the only reason we can really know what it is to love God back. We know God loved us because he sent Jesus, and confessing that this is true enables us to believe that God loves us. Abide in this, and God will abide in us, and there is nothing to be afraid of. "Perfect love casts out all fear."
I guess this is important to me because I struggle a lot with believe God loves me. I think most people do, and it's because I gauge the truth of God's love by my daily feelings, if i feel like God is looking on me with love or disgust that particular day. But this passage, and the whole bible really, tells me thats wrong. The fact that Jesus was sent by God and came and died so that we would be forgiven is just that, a fact. No magic, it was a factual transaction. So if I believe that, then I am believing that God loves me. He did the action. He loves me. They are the same. And because of that, I have nothing to be afraid of, ever. Yes, there is value in emotions in spirituality, but something this foundational needs to be understood concretely, and I need to make sure that the way I love people is through actions too!