LOVE WINS part deux

"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." William Shakespeare

Love wins. Everyday. Always. I know why it wins - the blood on the cross. But how? Practically speaking, in my life today and everyday, how does love win?

To answer this question, I quote William Shakespeare - certainly not the theological mastermind, however we cannot deny it when Truth is spoken, and he speaks it quite well in the following sonnet.

Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

I've been struggling with explanation, when all I had to do was turn to Shakespeare's eloquent ideas on the topic. "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." So succintly yet poignantly stated. A love that changes in regard to the various objects of that love, is no love at all. Period.

So go live a love that doesn't change.

While I was brainstorming the practical applications of love "winning" in our lives on a day to day basis, I was hoping (as all writers do at one point in time or the other) to come up with a magical and thorough list of ways to love with a selfless and sacrificial lifestyle. I am learning, however, that there is no list. My love manifests itself very differently from yours, as does yours from your neighbor's. The only constant among all of our "loves" is that it is like Christ's; all of our love must transcend this world, be motivated by Christ, and have no desire to gratify ourselves.

So let us be centered on Christ and love in all the ways that He has gifted us. I can't necessarily tell you how, and you can't necessarily tell me how. Just follow Jesus and love. Let us live a love that does not alter "when it alteration finds," and let us lose ourselves while doing it.