In September 2021, Lara Bazelon penned a love letter and published it in the New York Times. In it she swooned over her incredible, involved and loving husband and father of her three children.
But she still divorced him.
“I loved myself more,” she wrote in her love letter to herself — candidly titled, “Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love.”
Bazelon also declared in another article — this one titled, “I’ve Picked My Job Over My Kids” — she would no longer sacrifice her ambitions for her children.
I wonder how Bazelon celebrated this Valentine’s Day. Perhaps she sent a card to her 401(k); perhaps she crafted a poem for her laptop.
I spent it celebrating my mother’s birthday — a woman whose 1 Corinthians 13 love certainly eclipses any holiday’s feeble ideas. Unlike Bazelon, she willingly and humbly sacrificed her ambitions for her children, and unlike Bazelon, she loved her husband more than any woman I know.
Yet, she will gladly tell anyone that she loves because God first loved her, and she knows God loves her because God told her. He’s told everyone.
Some call the Bible God’s love letter to man, and while that arguably summarizes the Bible too simplistically, the Bible reveals the heart of a Father who loves His children even when they didn’t love Him. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us,” Paul writes in Romans 5:5. God “first loved us,” the Apostle John writes in 1 John 4:19.
However, because this Father loves His children, He also inspired the Bible to teach them love Him in return and embrace love’s joy. He also wants His children to embrace the joy of loving His truth, like King David, who wrote his longest psalm to declare his love for God’s Word. “I have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies, as much as in all riches,” he writes in 119:14. “O how love I thy law! It is my meditation all the day,” he states in 119:97.
Finally, God wants people to embrace the joy of loving others, so that others will love Him, repent and give Him the glory He deserves.
“Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned,” Paul writes in 1 Timothy 1:5. “Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently,” Peter writes in 1 Peter 1:22.
When people study the Bible with not just their minds, but also their hearts, they’ll translate truth into love — love that will change the world.
In 2011, for instance, two villages in Cameroon were arguing over burial rights, but one Sunday morning, one of the villages attacked the other, burning 300 homes and displacing 3,000 people. “All of us were running away, and they were following us, burning all these houses down for nothing. Everything was burnt down,” one villager said.
The attacked village members, however, still congregated the next Sunday to celebrate the dedication of the Gospel of Luke in their language, and its words convicted and convinced them to forgive the other village.
“I learned that I should do for others what I want them to do to me,” one villager said. “So I can’t hate them and not forgive them because I would want people to forgive me.”
In 2013, Dharshini and Chandrika left their Hindu faith to follow Jesus, shaming their relatives, who shunned them in anger.
The couple stayed faithful, though, and in 2019, Chandrika was preparing to sing for the church’s Easter service. Suddenly she heard a loud noise from the back of the church. She initially assumed the sound system had malfunctioned, but as people started to panic, she realized someone had detonated a bomb outside, killing 31 people, including Dharshini and their son.
“Emotionally, I was shocked, but I felt God’s presence on me,” Chandrika said.
In the following months, Christians worldwide supported the bomber’s victims, including Chandrika and her daughter, and her family, who would never read a Bible, noticed. They also noticed no Hindu groups helped.
“They said the love has been a testament to the faith we are following,” she said.
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