Love Amid It All

Note: On Tuesdays and some Sundays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there. 

The day after Christmas, a friend and I watched a few episodes of a series on the 1960s. She’s a bit older and

By Tonybove (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

came of age during that decade; I turned thirteen in 1969 and while I did a protest march or five, volunteered for political candidates, and know a lot of the music, much of the commentary and scenes was a bit foreign to me.

Except the love.

Whether people were frolicking in The Haight, screaming for the Beatles at Shea Stadium, or dancing to Jefferson Airplane at Woodstock, there was joy and wonder and happiness, and yes, love, on their faces. That’s not to diminish the lives that were being lost in Vietnam or the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedys, Medgar Evers, Patrice Lumumba, Malcolm X, Che Guevara and others during the decade. I would bet every one of those happy faces in those scenes was aware of the violent, evil, senseless side of the 1960s. But you can lose yourself in the dark… or you can find yourself in the light. For some, the light was temporary, fed by alcohol and drugs. But I would also bet that for many, the light began in love… of friends, of family, of life, and God. It might have taken a while for them to find God amid that tumultuous decade, but my guess, based on what I see in my friends of a certain age, that many of them got there and found Him to be the alpha and the omega, the source of all love.

I wonder what people will be dissecting about the 2010s fifty years from now: political rancor, senseless shootings, the music of Taylor Swift. I’m confident they also will find some faces filled with love… doing the Lord’s work at refugee camps, on Capitol Hill, and in neighborhoods. As we are told today in the lectionary reading from 1 John 4: “Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.”

Love without God is fleeting. Love with God is everything.