The Need for Love
by Dr. Harold Sala
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” -Romans 5:8
Our need to be loved was put there by God Himself, and it was He who also made provision for that great need to be met in our families. Do you remember the familiar words of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, “And now abide faith, hope, love but the greatest of these is love”?
No matter how great the need for love, it seems that our capacity really to love each other has been seriously diminished in the world of quick fixes and fractured, broken relationships.
Have you ever asked yourself, “What has happened to our ability to love?” Has it been gassed by the pernicious fumes that have polluted our environment? Or has it simply been pushed aside by our selfish desire for gratification? Have we so confused love with sex that we no longer understand what it is? I asked myself that question as I picked up the paper and read of a three year old who was seriously injured in an automobile accident.
The three year old was paralyzed from the neck down, but what was more distressing was the fact that his mother told reporters she did not intend to visit the boy in the hospital, because she no longer wanted to be bothered with a crippled son. But there is a good ending to this story. Dr. Gary Gieseke, the neurosurgeon who treated the boy, told his wife about the three year old boy who had no visitors in the hospital. That was when she started visiting the little fellow every afternoon, and eventually fell in love with him. The doctor and his wife finally adopted the boy and gave him the love that he needed.
But countless thousands of children are crippled emotionally and psychologically by a lack of parental love. Talk to a counselor in a juvenile detention home or prison, and you will discover that almost all the juvenile offenders have at least one thing in common they came from a home where love was missing. The home is the great classroom where a child first learns what love is by responding to it as an infant. As a child, he observes it in the lives of his parents and in his own way begins to practice it.
But what of the parent who honestly confesses to have no love for a child? We hear a lot about parents who have no love for each other. But is it not natural for a mother to love her child? Before you answer that, think for a moment. First, it is perfectly normal for every parent to have days when God’s precious jewels are only semi precious. It may be one of those days when you are tired and your nerves are on edge.
Every time you try to get your face washed, a three year old bangs on the door loud enough to wake the dead. You hear a little voice say “Mommy, mommy” every thirty seconds for most of your waking day. In an unguarded moment you may think, “I just cannot stand my kids. I would do anything to get away from them.” And I think that every mother has that need periodically, but does mean that you don’t love your child? Not for a moment!
Yet there are parents who really have no love for their children. The father who put cyanide pellets in fruit and gave it to his children one Halloween so he could collect their life insurance, while making it appear that someone else had given them the deadly apples, is a man who has no love for his children. There are people who have lost their love for each other and their children, because their hearts are hardened and they have lost their capacity to love.
When you allow God to touch your life, one of the first results is a new capacity to let love flow through us. It’s the only solution to a tough issue.
