Thrive!

The ranking is bronze, silver — gold.

And it is also faith, hope — love.

Not much beats gold, or love, as precious.

Love is the pure gold of God, and the summum bonum of life.

Many are the witnesses that love is supreme, and that without it we “gain nothing.” Love is everything — the core, the essence, the apex, the thing! All of our lives most of us have never wanted anything more than we have wanted to be loved. We ache for love, for falling in love, for being the loved one, for more delicious, life-giving, energy-making, life-curing love.

How do we get it?

Consider a young girl living in Missouri, who has never seen visited the ocean, any ocean, anywhere. She finds a picture of San Diego online. It is a beautiful shot, taken from the Coronado Bay bridge, showing the bay, the palm trees, the Silver Strand, the gorgeous Hotel Del Coronado and the great, sparkling Pacific beyond.

She holds her tablet, her 9.4 by 6.6 inch digital ocean in her hands and gushes, “I love the ocean!”

But there is so much of the ocean that she doesn’t know to love.

She doesn’t  know the knock-you-out, corner-of-eye to corner-of-eye,  panoramic expanse of the great Pacific, the lovely, blue watery arms of San Diego that shimmer like a dream land before you as you drive west up over the Coronado Bay bridge. And she doesn’t know the briny, salty, sea-in-the-air fragrance that greets you at the beach. And she doesn’t know the soft, clean, warm sand between the toes. She doesn’t know the cold, wet shock of the Pacific ocean as you enter it. She doesn’’t know the thrilling ride down the wave —  the rapid rush, the surfy slosh, the white water engulfing you.

To understand the ocean, and to understand love, we must live these realities not simply admire them from afar. To get love we must drive toward and into other people, and also God. We must experience the other, we must experience God, and we must sink our toes deep in to love, and then run to it’s shore, and dive in head first.

Reading about love in a book, even a sacred book, may be a gesture toward love, but it is no more love than looking at a picture of the ocean is experiencing the ocean.

To really know love, to experience love, to know the panoramic reality of love in all of life, to know the sweet fragrance of love found in difficult relationships, to know the warmth of love between your toes when you have been deeply valued, to know the cold shock of love being so much other than what you expected, to know the rapid rush of love as it washes you down the sloping, sliding, thrilling, scary waves of other people —  that is what it means to know love, and that is what it means to know God.

Love is good. Love is better. It is best. Love is best.

So, run at this. Smack this. Jump on this. Dive head-long into this.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:13