Love eh, the most excellent way, how do we sum this up. What is the main point I’d like to make about love? Well it’s this, “Love is the pursuit of relationships.”
Well what would that look like?
Let me tell you about a couple of young men who were born in the same town back early in the last century. These two boys Joe and Bill, had both grown up in a good area of town but they had both had abusive fathers. Life for both of them was painful right from the start. After putting up with abuse for a number of years as kids their fathers deserted their mothers, their families, just up and shot through.
Well these young boys and that’s all they were at the time resolved to be different to their fathers. But they did it in different ways, they both decided to never hurt another person. They were going to go about life completely different to the example they had been set.
Joe went about living the best he could, when people would get close to him he would cool the relationship down knowing that he didn’t want to be like his father. He had some friends but never close friends. There were a couple of girls over the years who had tried really hard to catch his eye, for Joe was a handsome young bloke, a good sports man, a bloke who held down a job in the local bakery, qualified as a pastry chef. Here was what looked like a good potential husband and father. But Joe had resolved he was never going to go there, he didn’t want to be like his father, no way.
Bill on the other hand, this other young bloke was a little smaller than Joe, a reasonable sort of half back and he worked with one of the local bush gangs felling native timber and doing planting and thinning work. He had decided that there was a girl in town he quite fancied, now this girl Diane was a couple of years older than him, she worked in the grocers shop and for a start was quite intent on giving Bill the brush off. But there was something about this young bloke, he just didn’t give up. There were chocolates left on the handle bars of her bike, with the note “I’ll send you the bill later.” With Bill underlined just in case she might think they were from someone else. There were cards and flowers, eventually she fell for Bill. Now Bill had pursued her for some time and he was determined he was not going to be like his father, he told his story to her and told her to put him right if he ever behaved in a way that worried her.
Diane and Bill married; Bill continued working in the bush gang. They tried for a family but with no results, the Doctor told them that it just wasn’t going to happen. Well Diane and Bill were determined to have kids so they chose to adopt. In the end they had managed to acquire a couple of girls from a distant cousin of Diane’s whose husband had been killed in an accident and just couldn’t support them, the local orphanage had a couple of kids they could not place, a young boy of mixed Chinese and Maori parentage with a cleft pallet and a little girl whose father was thought to be a Japanese sailor. Bill and Joan decided to love their kids and bring them up as their own.
Many times they encountered conflict but mainly as Bill supported his family against people who were narrow minded; people who could not love beyond what they understood. The family did well, the kids grew and had their own families, one of the girls and their son worked with Bill who by this time had developed his own logging company. Diane was involved in school committees and got elected to the local council and their other two daughters both did well in accounting before starting their own families. All in all Bill and Diane had eleven grandchildren and three great grandchildren before their lives were over. Joe lived and died alone, but neither Joe or Bill turned out to be like their fathers.
The thing is that love being the pursuit of relationship comes at a price, but the result of those relationships can be gain. Sometimes we don’t see this in the immediate. However not loving, not pursuing relationships also comes at a cost, there is never gain. Sometimes we don’t see this in the immediate either.