Real Love

This is real love.
The love Dick Hoyt has for his son is a love that is beautiful and rare in our world.
A love the believes, that is self-sacrificing. A love that will do anything to see others happy, a love that dreams and then does everything it can to reach those dreams.
The father-son relationship between Dick Hoyt and his son Rick is one that is unseen and unexperienced by most. Why? Why is real love so rare to us? Shouldn't we all be living like this?

Lately I have struggled with the thought that God is love. Not that God himself is love, because that concept is not very hard to grasp, but the concept that God is the only one who can show us what real love is. God is the only one who can show us how to love eachother spiritually. Without God, there is always a part of love that is missing, a part that cannot be recognized, understood, or shown until we first know the love of God.

I am not putting Dick Hoyt on a pedestal here and saying that he is an amazing man for loving his son the way God intended for us to love oneanother, but I am saying that he should be an example to us all, an inspiration. But not only that, he can also show us the love of our Father, love which we may have previously been misisng out on.

We are all born spiritually handicapped. Like Rick we struggle to make it through life. When we come to know Christ, that handicap is overcome and we are made into a new person with a new identity in Christ. However, God must still carry us. There are many things we wish we could do on our own, but we can't. We are not God, we do not have his power, his strength, his capabilities. So he carries us. He runs with us. He lifts us up and helps us to acheive our dreams. Like Dick runs marathons for his son Rick, God does this for us. He sacrifices the things he loves most to help us become, and to overcome.
Satan see's us as useless, he thinks that we should be put away and he leads us to believe that we have nothing to offer. Then God comes in and gives us the tools we need to accomplish things. He shows us that with his help, we can do anything. For nothing is impossible with God.

I can't answer for anyone else, but I know why my love is sometimes not the real love that God has given me. It is not because I am human, or because I live in a fallen world, or becasue I am actually unable to love the way I was meant to. Though those could be other factors. The real reason is that I am selfish. until we overcome our need to put ourselves first we will never be able to love the way we were meant to. God put our hearts before the life of his one and only Son. What will you do to experience the love of God? What will you do to help others do the same?
I can only imagine.