We use the word a lot. We brandish it with adjectives and pronouns and give it oomph anyway we can. Advertisers use it to sell their wares. Politicians and patriots use it to preserve a national idealogy. Churches offer it to all for free. Schools forbid it.

It is visible and it is invisible. It is tangible and intangible. It can be painful and it can be rapturous. It can be fluid and it can be solid. It can be the best deal around or it can be the biggest fake in town. It is alive or it is dead. It is weak or it is strong. It is - or it isn't.

It's called...love...

What a word - as if it were like any other word - just speak it and wish it so. Just say it aloud and it will work wonders for you. Just believe you are wrapped in it and you'll sleep like a baby. Push it away, reject it, and you become a stainless steel stock pot, all shiny and promising on the outside but full of spiced up soup made with refrigerated leftovers.

Pass love around  and get back double - triple - above all you can ask or think. Forbid it, suspect it, deny it and refuse it, and you are a dead man walking.

Love is not a requirement for living. A man can live without it but he will be the most miserable man on the planet. The most tyrannical and hateful leaders of nations of men find solace in the arms of their wives though it may be a temporary and rather selfish love, just for the moment, it may even border on distrust and betrayal, not love at all, not even a real  kindness...

Love comes to kings and to peasants alike, a universal breeze that blows across and into every corner of God's wondrous earth to seed itself into the hearts of the willing. It is not to be confused with sudden kindness or  the generosity of human love, for human love can never rise to the foothills let alone the apex of the God kind of love.

If it is of men, sons of Adam, it is the post-Garden variety, not worth a hoot or a holler. Indeed the nature of human love can be deadly. The call of the flesh and the purse is always stronger than the bonds of human love and  strong men of supposedly virtuous substance cannot always evade the  temptations of covetousness. Human love is in transit - here today and gone tomorrow - you cannot take it to the bank or ensure it against loss. It is a will-o'-the-wisp attraction that is conditional on the returns expected.

What a shame, what a tragedy, what an eternal loss for the one who puts his trust in temperate love, which is a restrictive love, when there is provided for each of us a love that knows no bounds, a salvation through the One called Love. "And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us" (Romans 5:5).

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16).

It was God who so loved the world He had created, and the men He had created, that He sent Himself, His eternal Word, fashioned in the form of man by the Holy Ghost. The Word was placed in the womb of a virgin and was born in a lowly stable in the company of angels, to offer the men of earth everlasting life through the One that fashioned and keeps "everlasting..."

Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son born of God, and the only begotten God-Son born of man.  He was born Crown Prince of Heaven and Earth. He was and is God incarnate. Nevertheless, He yielded always to the will of God the Father that had sent Him.

"For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved.

"He that believes on Him is not condemned; but He that believes not is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

"And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

"For everyone that does evil hates the light, neither comes to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.

"But he that follows truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God" (John 3:17-21).

Human love is temporary. It dies with the man and is buried and forgotten. But Godly love never dies. The flesh of a man dies but the truth, the light, the love and the life of a Godly man is passed on to the generations that follow. In Heaven he basks in the everlasting love that is so deep there is no bottom to the well. And it will go on forever and forever, it is indeed everlasting...

If you don't know Jesus, whose love endured the Cross for you, then put away your doubts, your fears and your pride, and "come away with me," says the Lord, "and let me teach you the meaning of love..."