The Quality of God’s Love

Week of January 31, 2016

In our Second Reading, Paul invites us to be mesmerized by love.  He tells us to look at what the best of human love can be.  Love is patient and kind.  It is understanding.  Love never fails.  At the end of the reading, Paul tells us that only three things remain: faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.  This reading was the reading we used when my dad passed away. I remember looking into my mom’s eyes and telling her how these words came alive when I thought of them as parents.  They had faith and hope, but their greatest strength was their love.

What we experience on earth is only a glimpse of the love of God.  God’s love is perfectly great, perfectly forgiving, perfectly hope filled.  When I think of the greatest moments that I cherish in which I saw the love of my parents lived out, I know there is something even greater in God’s love for us.  My parents always walked hand in hand, stopping on the way to church and on the way home to feed the neighborhood dogs. Their act of walking hand in hand happened on the way to the supermarket, as they walked to go shopping. While getting on a bus or the train, it happened.  Hand in hand.  God longs to walk with us hand in hand.  It is my prayer that we let Him.

Rev. John J. Ouper