What Is Love?

I go to central Pennsylvania every year to meet with fellow publishers from a 10-state area; I have gotten to know these dear people fairly well and I enjoy being around them. We talk about our work in the formal sessions, but after hours we tend to talk about life. It is the “life” stuff that has bonded us.
One of the discussions I had this past week was with a friend I’ll call Sam. He told me that he was raised as a Catholic, but now says he is almost an atheist, no longer believing “that stuff in the Bible.”
I responded that it is one thing to say he doesn’t believe the Bible, but another to say he doesn’t believe that a supreme being even exists. I told him it’s clear to me that the universe is too marvelous to think it was not designed.
We left this conversation with him saying, “There is too much wrong with this world; if a supreme being were there he would not sit idly by.”
Sam is a very hard working man and very successful. What strikes me is how such an applied man in one area of life can leave this question of eternal consequence unanswered; it smacks of intellectual laziness. I know he is unsettled, though, because he told me so. Actually I have a fair number of atheist or agnostic friends, and each one of them is to various degrees unsettled.
The reason I have these conversations with my friends is because they are my friends, and I care about them. I have walked their road, and have concluded not only that God exists, but that the Bible is true. Being a father working with his children has helped me to see how God is working with me, walking with me through the trials and joys of life.
The fact that he would give his life for me squares with my feelings for my family; each of their lives is more precious to me than my own life; losing our son taught me that I think most parents would say the same thing.
recorded history, like all of the rest of history.
I am going to keep telling my friends what I think, as long as they care to ask. My older brother, Dan, was literally on his deathbed when he came to think as I do.
This coming Friday is the day most Christians observe Christ’s death by being nailed to a cross, and Sunday when he returned from the dead. This works for me. I could go through life weighted down by all my failures, mistakes and sins; but instead I’m free of that because he took on that penalty in my place.
I say it works for me, because as a father I don’t want my children to go around defeated by their mess-ups. I want them to focus forward. We all do that for our children; we step in when they fall, brush them off, encourage them, and get them back in a positive direction. Since we do that for our kids, it is understandable that the one who made us would do it for us.
It is called Love.
ART HALL, publisher