My friend and I were at an impasse. Time and again we cycled through the same arguments, each trying to convince the other that our way forward was the right one, but never really understanding each other nor breaking our logjam.
While praying about the situation, I realized I had allowed my love for this individual to be reduced to little more than an abstraction. While I wished her only good, my goal wasn’t to listen to her—to be open to her concerns and curious about her ideas—but rather to get her to acknowledge that I was right and get her on board with my plan.
From this difficult place my superficial practice of love became apparent, and I began to reach for a deeper grasp on love. The Bible tells us that God is the source of love. In fact, God is Love itself (see I John 4:8). So in order to understand what love is, one has to know God—to understand that God’s love is so all-encompassing, so infinite, that nothing can exist unlike Love. Even fear is impossible in the consciousness filled with Love, and Christian Science teaches that there is no other consciousness. John explains, “Love contains no fear” (I John 4:18, J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English).
