As tens of millions have travelled in the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving with their families, it is a reminder of how much love there is in families. Isn't it?
Maybe, maybe not.
The public health officials travelling to gather in mixed ages from different States may just be the most dangerous thing a group can do towards each other mid-pandemic. Endangering each other is not love. And here lies an example of the problem with love.
We define our own love. And we will not be told what love really is by anyone else. Including God.
John Robinson, the Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, was wise enough to see that self-defining love is true of just one being - God. He wrote:
God loveth himself first and most as the chiefest good
Jesus made the same point in the prayer to His Father in John chapter 17.
“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
God lived, love lived, before any human love. And any human love is to be defined by God, not human beings. And this offends us very much, but that doesn't change its truth.
Love in the creature ever presupposeth some good, true or apparent, in the thing loved, by which that affection of union is drawn.
Our love is a victim of our unreliable attraction to things and people, sometimes worthy, sometimes pleasant, sometimes dodgy, sometimes criminal. But our love reaches out to what attracts us. But God?
But the love of God, to the contrary, causeth all good to be produced in the creature.
His love gives the goodness rather than seeking it out. Jesus came to seek the lost, the sick, the unlovely, the dead, the criminal, the leper.
Like all Western Countries - but bigger and better of course - the United States has a culture of self-defining love. Holywood has helped it along fabulously. Yet 400 years ago those pilgrims were fed by their Pastor a view of love which would draw out holiness rather than Holywood. And may that wisdom not disappear from either side of the Atlantic completely.
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