Love is as strong as death,
its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like blazing fire,
like a mighty flame.

Many waters cannot quench love;
rivers cannot wash it away.

If one were to give
all the wealth of his house for love,
it would be utterly scorned.

—Song of Solomon 8:6-7

Love is Fierce

I want to speak in praise of love on Valentine's Day. I didn’t really know this passage in Song of Songs until Joel and Jena chose it for their wedding verse, but it has become very important to me. Sometimes people ask, “Why is God jealous? If he is loving, shouldn’t he be accepting and give us the freedom to love him on our own terms? How can God be both loving and jealous?”

But anyone who has ever been in love knows what it means to be jealous. If someone betrays your love and it doesn’t make you angry, you’re not being mature—you’re not loving.

God loves you so much that if you do not love in return it hurts him. He has bound up his happiness with yours, and if you are unhappy it is like a flaming sword through his heart.

Love Never Fails

Sometimes I play a little game with Aubrey and Auden, “What is the greatest superpower in the world?” Sometimes we talk about earth bending and fire bending or Superman and Batman, but they know that the real answer is love.

What can defeat love? Can a child do something that will separate him from his mother’s love? We have faced death as a community. Can even death stop you from loving? It might be all the easier to love a person you don’t see every day. Sometimes separation can be the best thing that happens to a relationship.

If Valentine’s Day is special for you because of special someone, cherish it. Love is the greatest gift, the most powerful force, the greatest confidence against the future that there is. “Love never fails,” Paul says.

To Love is to Receive More than you Give

But some of us don’t have very romantic expectations for today. I remember thinking about having children before Aubrey and Auden were born. “Will I make a good parent? Will I be able to love unconditionally?”

But when you have children—and maybe it’s the same when you help someone else have a child at Shiphrah or when you care for a baby in the little children’s home—you realize that the love we receive is so much more than what we give. The model of unconditional love is not the parents' love for their child—but the child’s hopeless abandon to their parents. If we are to teach our children how to love, the irony is that it is a skill we learn first from them.

We Live on Love

This mission is a unique phenom- enon. We have been barely scraping by for 22 years. When have we ever had enough money to operate? How many times have we had to pay partial salaries? How often do we get a Meralco bill or the SSS is due—and there’s no way in the world we can pay it?

But we’ve been flat broke…for 22 years. We’ve overcome things that I think would have killed another community. When Dennis got sick seven years ago, we were stretched beyond what anyone of us thought was possible. But we didn’t just survive; we grew stronger. When Dennis died, it rocked our boat. And it’s still rocking. But we haven’t sunk either. In fact, I think we are getting stronger. I think we have a stronger community now than we have ever had before.

I think the only reason we have been able to weather these storms—of financial crisis, health crisis, identity crisis—is because we’re a family. Because we love one another. If we were just an organization, we would have collapsed a long time ago. It’s not because of any merit that we are still here, but because we have love one for another. We need to grow in love, but we will only grow if we realize—if we know deep down inside—that it is love that makes us strong. Our love is not perfect, but it is a deep, deep good. I am proud of this community and of my love for you. I need to grow—in openness, in generosity, in commitment—but what will help me to grow is a deep love that is already here.

Money for Love is Bad Math

If you were to ask me, “Darren—would you trade this community, this sense of belonging to one another, for financial security?” I would say, “No.” If we had all the money we ever needed—but we weren’t a family, weren’t dependent on one another like a child is on her parents—our mission would collapse. We wouldn’t have money problems, but we’d have every other kind of problem. The Song of Solomon says, “If one were to give all the wealth of his house for love, it would be utterly scorned.”