It is quite evident that terms such as marriage and family, freedom and ideal womanhood, have entirely different meaning than they had two hundred years ago. In discussion with others afterwards, I realized that an even more important concept has been redefined: love. Love is the very core of all community. It is the core especially of marriage. Therefore, without a proper understanding of love, we cannot defend these time-tested institutions.
How are we to convey the meaning of love to the questioning world around us? We must "tell true stories," as one of my professors puts it. We must, whether in fiction or non-fiction, tell a story that is consonant with the truth about human nature, about society, about the world. And in these stories, we must depict love--the love of God, love for mankind, married love, and love tainted by sin or misunderstanding or horrible grief.
How can we, while living in a fallen world, depict the positive side of Christian love to an audience determined to paint us as negative, bigoted, naive individuals? We can paint the beauty of love as it ought to be.
But how? Many of us have never seen a good model of what Christian married love ought to be. We have never felt the love of a supportive Christian community that did not fall to bickering the minute the elders' backs were turned. We have never truly learned what it means to love our neighbor for his humanity instead of hating him for his sin, which is an attendant circumstance of his sojourn here on earth. We do not know what it means to fully trust another person or to give everything possible without fearing our favor will go unnoticed. Sometimes we fear even our own sinful nature and recoil from this earthly life itself in hatred.
But still we know what the world needs to hear. We need not ignore the bleak, sin-tattered details of the world around us. But the light of love can soften the harshness of reality as it first comes to our eye.
So we have one duty today:
Find a way to say, "I love you!"
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