The Greatest of These is Love

The key to raising Missionaries, Martyrs and Saints is Love. As St. Paul tells us in 1st Corinthians Chapter 13, we can do all the right things as parents, have the most efficiently run home on the block, provide our kids the best education, use the right form of discipline every time, always have the right words to say to soothe a broken heart or a scraped knee, but if we do not have love, then we are only a noisy gong.

Learning the Hard Way

I have one daughter who showed me in a very concrete way that love is truly the most important thing that I must to show to each of my children. A few years back she was participating in a sport and was not giving it her best effort. For many children this may not be a big issue, but for her it was an opportunity to teach her an important lesson about the importance of perseverance in the difficulties that we encounter in our lives. For her, most things come easy and when she encounters something that is difficult, she decides that she would rather give up than struggle with developing that skill. It is in this context that I learned a valuable lesson in God’s love.

In my endeavor to teach her a lesson in fortitude, she questioned my love for her. When she believed that my love for her was conditional based upon her success in that particular sport, she effectively stopped listening to what I had to say. She even got really mad at me and refused to speak with me for a couple of days. Instead of trying to prove my point about the virtue of fortitude, I decided to tell her that no matter how mad she was at me, there was nothing she could do to cause me stop loving her, it didn’t matter if she was successful and I would still love her even if she didn’t love me. She thought about that for a little while and when the anger subsided, we were able to talk about the situation and the motivation behind my actions.

No matter how right we are in an argument, if the other person does not believe that you have their best interest at heart (otherwise known as loving them), you are a clashing cymbal or a banging gong and the message you are trying to convey may be lost.

God, the Perfect Father

God’s love is much more than many of us have experienced in our earthly lives. His love is patient and kind, it is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, it does not insist on its own way, it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things and His love for us will never end. As a father myself, I can tell you that I fall short of demonstrating God’s love within my family on a regular basis, but I get back up and try again each time.

His love is not conditional, He does not love us because we attain some great achievement, He does not love us because we are beautiful, He does not love us because we love him, He loves us because of who we are and by the mere fact that He is our Father. There is nothing we need to do to earn his love. He only desires us to love him back, but even if we completely reject him and mock him and offend him. He will never stop loving us, in fact He will pursue us even more to save us from ourselves. The more we run away from his love and reject him, the more He will do to draw us back to himself.

God’s love may seem irrational and foreign to many of us, but that may be due to our lack of experience with it. Through prayer, frequent reception of the sacraments, and reading scripture, we can come to a better understanding of God’s love and thus be able to love our children as God loves us. “So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Cor. 13:13 NAB)