Valerie is a 42-year-old, single, Reformed Christian lady who lives in Baltimore. She doesn't remember a time
before she knew and loved Jesus, but she does remember accepting John Calvin into her heart in March of 2000.
Valerie is a member of Christ Reformed Evangelical Church in Annapolis.
Though her career aspiration is to be a housewife, Valerie has not yet found anyone suitable who wishes to hire
her for employment in that field (or, more properly, anyone suitable has not found her), so in the meantime she
earns her daily bread working in communications -- editing, writing, print design and website management.
Here's an Interesting Linguistic Factoid
"In Macedo-Romanian, they do not have the word 'to love.' They use instead 'to will.'" How differently might our culture think about love if it meant for us 'to will' rather than so much 'to feel'?
Posted by Valerie (Kyriosity) at 10:20 AM
• Permalink
•
•
5 comments
5 Comments:
On July 12, 2009 11:47 PMJust me.wrote... I grew up understanding 'love' as a feeling. I remember singing this old song, "I Know Something About Love" and my grandmother commenting, "What do you know about love?" And, I had no response. It wasn't until I was married that I really talked with my husband about the word love, and he described it as obeying God's commands (among other things). In that sense, loving someone takes on a whole new meaning, not just what you feel when you are around someone or something you LIKE.
I know this isn't the besetting problem of our larger culture, but it could be a problem with some subgroups, who want to brainiac emotion right out of existence -- we have to be careful to make sure that we don't define the feelings right out of it. Tevye's wife Golda is not to be our model. What she had was a form of love, but it wasn't the totality. And we should be shooting for the totality, not settling for one half because we're fed up with the bad effects of too much focus on the other half. If love is sincere, it will be felt, though not necessarily at every moment it is called upon to be exercised.
Still, even within (ahem) certain subgroups it is important to remember that the limits of our feelings shouldn't be the limits of our ability to love. So I generally agree.
Jane and Dan -- I don't want us to completely do away with the feeling aspect of love -- I think that's important, too -- but considering the way language influences thought, it'd be interesting to know how different our thinking would be if we had a little bit more will in our affections.
On August 6, 2009 6:54 PMDJPwrote... Well, FWIW, I think Piper's gone overboard on emotion, and wrongly undervalued commitment, attitude, will.
But don't tell some of my readers. Make a frowny-face even towards Piper's direction, and you've a brawl on your hands.
