Deep Love

During the staff prayer time we were asked to focus on 1 Peter.  I ended up trapped in the eighth verse of the fourth chapter.

“Most important of all,

continue to show deep love for each other,

for love covers a multitude of sins”

This left me with quite a few questions.  Like what constitutes ‘deep love’ and how exactly does it ‘cover a multitude of sin’?

Personally, I feel showing ‘deep love’ means to be willingly inconvenienced.  Deep love is shown when you received that which the giver willingly paid the cost to obtain.  This can be easily (and inaccurately) illustrated with money.  The monetary price of an object is such a subjective thing that can not be equally measured.  That’s why we bawk at shows that tell what celebrities are willing to pay for dog houses, gold plated toilet seats, and closets just for their shoes.  A more evenly distributed resource is time.

How much time are we willing to give someone?  Time is a cost more universally attached to a sign of deep love.  When my father is spending his time watching a ball game but turns the television off when I ask to talk – that’s deep love.  When a friend that is a mother, wife  and student budgets her time to send a handwritten letter – that’s deep love.  When you rearrange your busy schedule, your never-ending list of to-do’s, and you save time to make a phone call to a lonely friend – that’s deep love.

After all, with Christ as our model of love, didn’t He show us that to truly love requires some inconvenience.  The man, our God in flesh, laid down His life.

Even celebrities understand death has a huge cost.   Brooke Shields is quoted as saying, “Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.”

I’m not a theology but I understand that even though Christ laid down his life He was able to pick it up again.  After all, we serve a LIVING God.  So even though it might seem easy to lay a thing that if you know you’re going to get it back – why can’t that be true for us.

If  we lay down a remote control or  a coffee cup to show deep love – can’t we too pick it back up again?  And when we do – I’m pretty sure it won’t feel as important as it did before we set it down.