Love has a strange and marvelous influence upon us. Its effect is multifaceted; love never touches us in just one way.

Poets, musicians, philosophers, and artists have striven through the ages to describe love, but love is so vast, so complex, that even the greatest creative geniuses have scarcely managed to touch on the subject.

Love really is remarkable. Consider, for a moment, just a few of love’s wonderful qualities:

• love intensifies, animates, and soothes
• love says “you are perfect as you are now” while inspiring constant refinement
• love makes you feel responsible for that which you love
• love gives rise to selflessness
• love insists on sincerity and authenticity
• love’s nature is forgiving; repentance transfers potential forgiveness to kinetic forgiveness
• love’s will is eternal progress
• love’s design is truth

Love is so many things. Isn’t love wonderful!?! I’ll leave you today with this parting thought from Petrarch:

Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good.