Dare to Love

By: Kelly Cole

Raised in an irreligious household, I had no one to turn to when I was exposed at an early age to the sorrows of this world—untimely death, disability, and illness. Yet I never doubted that there was a God or that He was a good God. Amid the trials, there was always the experience of joy. There was always an awareness of beauty. There was always an encounter with love. Somehow, God shone through in my life, though I had little context within which to recognize Him. 

When I arrived at Hillsdale and was fully introduced to Christianity for the first time, it was wonderful (truly, I was full of wonder)—and it was overwhelming.

What to believe? How to believe? One day, fairly early on, when I was getting frustrated over a lack of belonging, over the question of which church I should be baptized in, an acquaintance told me never to forget that God is love; that we were made for love, made out of love; and that anywhere I gave or received love, God was there. (This same friend also reminded me to recite Mark 9:24, “I do believe, Lord, help my unbelief!”)

This advice has seen me through many highs and lows in life: questions of faith, questions of suffering, questions of how to know and do God’s will. The answer I can always understand is “love.”

A thorough education teaches us to think well, think deeply. Sometimes, this thinking can leave us with doubts or questions about the Christian life that are hard to reconcile. Our faith life can be frozen in inaction. What can we fall back on? Love. We can ask the Holy Spirit, the person of the eternal exchange of love between the Father and the Son, to illuminate our intellect, inspire our will, and bring us peace. Where can we find God when it feels like He has deserted us? He is always found in acts of love, in sacrificing for the good of another, in loving our neighbor as we do ourselves.

Often our suffering has its origins in the very goodness of love—grief over a lost loved one, the pain of watching someone we love suffer, the agony of betrayal, our own mental or physical illness that means we cannot love others as we wish. In all of this, we must see the love at the origin of our pain, be grateful for that love, and be willing to sit quietly (and sadly) at the foot of the cross, trusting that Jesus is there with us, loving us and sustaining us in our hardship. We may not know, again, how to carry on in the Christian life after tragedy or great difficulty, but the answer is always somewhere tied up with love. Opening ourselves to God’s love and being willing, again, to share the gift of our own love with others—even when it means the tough work of forgiving, and even if it might mean getting hurt again.

Discerning God’s will for our lives can be overwhelming. Among so many options, we must look for the way of love—especially as it is before us today (not some day far off into the future). How can we use the gifts God has given us—our unique talents and strengths—to share God’s love with the world? This is so much more how we do something than what we do. Any job can be done with love. Any relationship can be guided by love when selfishness is vigilantly pushed aside. The way of love is a hard path—it’s so very hard to die to self over and over again—but it is a joyful path. We cannot do it on our own, but—open to the grace of God—He will fill us with the strength we need: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).

Of course, there are many ways in which everything I have said here is overly simplistic. In English, we have one word for love. In the Holy Scriptures, there are several. “Love” can be an emotion, a feeling, or an act of the will, a verb. In our Christian life, as created beings with an intellect and a will, we must work every day to choose love, to find God in love, even if we don’t feel it, feel Him. As one of my favorite priests recently said, “This isn’t a love you ‘fall into.’ This is a love you work for.”

Even with our greatest attempt to be disciplined, we can know that we all will fail to live this life of love. I do, every day. But God perpetually welcomes us to try again, no matter our failings, and He will assist us if we let Him.

Twenty-plus years later, I have no doubt that my friend was right—I can always find God, I can always find belonging, in an act of love (given or received). I have been so blessed to know God’s love for me, to be loved by my husband more than I could ever deserve, to love our children as the greatest gifts of this world, to share love with friends and neighbors and strangers. It is here, everywhere, for all of us.

I close with a portion of Pope Benedict XVI’s World Youth Day message of 2007: 

“My dear young friends, I want to invite you to “dare to love.” Do not desire anything less for your life than a love that is strong and beautiful and that is capable of making the whole of your existence a joyful undertaking of giving yourselves as a gift to God and your brothers and sisters, in imitation of the One who vanquished hatred and death forever through love.”

You, yes you, are of infinite value, created in the image of God, a gift to be given to Him—and to others—in love, from love, out of love.