Day 42 - Don’t stop loving

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever!

1 Corinthians 13:4-8

I am blessed to live near the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and its most recent exhibition is by Robert Indiana. His work spans over 50 years and since the 1960s he has been fascinated with the word and idea of love. Indiana grew up in a plain and sparce Churches where the only decoration would be the lettering above the platform - something like ‘God is love’. Over time he experimented with arranging the letters, changing colours, creating sculpture as well as paintings. He painted his ‘Love’ letters in black and white after the death of Martin Luther King and later illuminated the letters which made them reminiscent of the signage of American diners. Somehow his work seems timeless and very hippy-era sixties, universal and referencing the so-called American dream, all at the same time.

How many different ways can you write love?

How many ways can you show love?

Attitudes and actions of love are both timeless and completely of the moment and like Indiana’s inspiration, I believe they have their source in God. My problem with 1 Corinthians 13 is that it is not a definite list, it is poem that encourages us to add more lines and discover new ever-more variations.

What I also love are what I call, the ‘unknowings of love’. Someone once came up to me and told me that the way I had included her in a conversation years before had made all the difference when she was at a low ebb in her life. I had no memory of this at all. Had I set out to a be a spectacular facilitator I probably would have come over as fake. The Holy Spirit did her stuff and arranged the letters just so.

Love can be intentional or accidental but what I love about love is its endless variety.

Just notice love in all its forms today.

Suzanne Nockels