Stephen R. Covey, whose book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989, p.132) was a best-seller for a long time, tells of an exercise he sometimes used with his students while he was teaching college. He required his students to think through what they would do if they had only the remainder of the semester to live. He said that exercise often produced some profound responses. The dominant theme of the resulting activity, the underlying principle, was love. Have you ever been pushed into deciding what you really want most out of life? If you have, have you found yourself discovering that love is the most important thing in life for you? Lots of people have.
Love really is the most important thing. But lots of us don't have a good idea of what love is. Some time ago, a psychologist named Erich Fromm wrote a book on The Art of Loving (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), and he said that we must learn to love. He said that we need to first learn the principles, and then we need to practice them just like someone learning an art.
If we want to learn to love, the first thing we need is to get a really good idea of what love is and of what the real thing looks like. If we look to our popular culture, especially the entertainment industry that does even more than we realize to shape our ways of thinking and living, we will get the idea that love is some combination of selfishness, jealousy, and sex. Most of us know instinctively that is not what it is. But what is it?
The eternal question so ably answered in the person of Jesus Christ.
