people fail, but love never does

​If I have everything in the world - every power in the world - but I don't have love, I am nothing.

I've never completely understood the whole "mic drop" thing, but that scripture seems to fit the sentiment.

This scripture in 1 Corinthians goes on to say:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

Love never fails.

I think many of us read that scripture and think, you know, I want to be more loving so I'm going to work on my patience. I want to be more loving so I'm going to try to stop being so envious. I want to be more loving so I'm going to try to start honoring other people better.

We want to be more loving so we make a list of loving things to do that we can work on. And as noble and good as those efforts might be, they will ultimately miss the mark and fail. Because unlike love, people always fail.

I think we need to be more focused on becoming people who are filled with love instead of focusing on becoming people who do more loving things. When we are people filled with love, loving engagement with others will always overflow from our hearts.

When we are people thinking about and becoming more dedicated to loving, when we are trying to memorize what it looks like to be more loving toward others, ultimately that is a mental exercise that will wear us out.

So how do I become filled with more love?

The only way I can answer that is to tell you how I work on it. Please here me say "I work on it." I am not a perfectly loving person - not by a very long stretch. But I am more committed these days to having more love in my heart than I am committed to doing more loving things.

For me, there has to be an unfailing source of love in your life. You first and foremost have to feel overwhelmingly loved, unconditionally, if you are ever to be an unconditional outpouring of love in everyone else's life.

For me, that source is Christ. Christ said I created you to be loved and accepted and appreciated and honored.

I realize for some people that is not your source of love. I'm not trying to tell you this has to be your source - I'm just suggesting we all have to have a source. We all have to feel loved with an unfailing love. If we don't feel loved completely we will never become a person who is grounded and motivated by love.

And love never fails.

Running and prayer - often they are the same thing to me - they are where I get grounded in that love. When we look around the world and we see a lot of unloving things going on, that can wear on and consume our minds. We can begin to think in unloving ways. We can begin to feel unloved. We can become the people who fail instead of the love that never does.

Running and prayer are where I remove that noise and settle into a heart space that gets centered on that overwhelming love being poured into me. Sometimes becoming a more loving person is as simple as finding your way for filtering the hate and discontent out of your person.

For me, more and more, my prayer life is about shutting everything out. Complete quiet. My prayer life is about shutting off every thought in my life and just being still and quiet. It's about becoming more in touch with what lives in my heart and detaching from what is begging to live in my head. Because my mind always fails me, love never does.

I suppose to some that sounds like meditation. Maybe. I just call it be still and listen. I think as Christians, especially, we've tried to define what prayer is and what it should look like and if you don't do it right then you're not praying.

I guess I just think God isn't always as concerned with hearing what is on my mind as much as he is with me feeling his love. You think God doesn't know what we want and need and have on our minds to say to him? What God often wants to hear most from us is nothing. He just wants us to be still and listen.

He wants us to be still and listen and feel his overwhelming love.

Because if we don't feel overwhelmed by some source of unfailing love in our lives, we'll always fail at being a source of overwhelming love for others.