The Word I’ve Rarely Heard

This one took me a long time to write. I suppose its because its deeply vulnerable to me on a personal level. To be completely honest, I debated about posting it at all, but I’ve also had similar posts (The Box in the Alley The Ache From The Window, Being The Light You Can’t Hide).

Regardless, I figured the limited to no audience size would make that hesitation moot anyway. So here we go.

I start this whole article by saying: I can count on one hand the number of people who have ever told me they loved me.

I dont say that to make you feel sorry for me. It’s simply a fact I’ve been chewing on lately in trying to understand what it has actually revealed about me.

Every man I’ve been with said a version of the same thing. It’s never “I love you,” but “I hope to love you” or “I love how I benefit from you.” A conditional tense… or a transactional one.

A love, really, that’s held out at arm’s length.. either promised as a future possibility as though love is somehow a place they might someday reach. Or a acknowledged personal benefit to their own ego, only present as long as I am.

My son has never said the words to me, though his reasons are his own and tied to a complicated childhood I won’t lay bare here.

But when I say them to him, he’ll smile big and nod and say “you know”, refusing the words themselves while urgently transmitting their meaning, velcroed to my side the whole time I have him.

There is no doubt in me that he loves me. I have simply never heard him say it. And somehow the absence of the words alongside the overwhelming presence of the thing has taught me more about love than any of my books (or therapists) ever have.

My parents never said it either.

They said I had better love them. that I was to honor them, obey them, love them as my duty. It ran only in their direction, obligatory, and never returned. And then, on the rare occasions I dated…one date, maybe two…I’d have someone tell me they loved me before they could possibly have known what they were loving. Put on a pedestal by the end of a single evening, handed the word by someone who had decided, based on a few hours and a feeling, that it applied.

So I’ve received the word rarely from the people who most clearly meant it, and freely from people who could not possibly have. And that strange inversion has made me wrestle with what the word even means. And, underneath that, with what God means by it, versus what we’ve made of it.

There’s a familiar sermon point about the poverty of the English word “love.”

We use one word for everything from “I love my wife” to “I love pizza,” while Greek had several: eros, philia, storge, agape. With each naming a different reality. They taught this a lot when I was in bible school, and it became popular (and easy) to insert into a sermon.

But it stops short of the actual mess I’m finding within the word “love”.

None of my experiences had anything to do with confusing love for a pizza-level fondness. What I encountered was something stranger: falsification, mistranslation, love declared where it couldn’t yet exist and withheld where it plainly did. The problem isn’t only that one English word covers too much ground. It’s that the word gets deployed in ways that have nothing to do with its meaning: as flattery, as a sort of pedestal-building, as a conditional promise, as a duty demanded but never offered back.

And the timing alone of all of it reveals how unstable the word is. Some people can’t say “love” to a romantic partner until 4 months in, as though it must be earned through sufficient accumulated evidence. Yet the same person will whisper it to a newborn seconds old, a stranger they’ve never spoken with, who has done nothing and proven nothing. The word means something so different in those two mouths that it’s almost not the same word. One version is a conclusion reached because of sufficient data. The other is given instantly and unconditionally, prior to any data at all.

Which of those is closer to how God loves? Because those two can’t both be the center of it.

God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). Not after we’d earned it. Not once we’d proven worthy of the declaration. While we were still His enemies, actively opposed to Him, the love was already fully committed. And John pushes it further back still: In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us (1 John 4:10). The love originates entirely on His side, prior to anything we do, prior to our even wanting it.

This is the newborn model, not the 4-months-of-dating model.

God’s love is the love spoken over the infant who has done nothing, except that in God’s case, it’s spoken over enemies, which is more scandalous still. Jeremiah records God saying I have loved you with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3). A love without beginning, without the accumulating-evidence phase, without conditions to be met before the word applies. It was true before I existed to earn it.

So when the men in my life said “I hope to love you,” they were speaking the exact opposite of what’s biblical. They made love conditional and future, contingent on whether I turned out to be worth it. God makes love unconditional and already present, contingent on nothing in me at all. The “pedestal” daters, oddly, were closer to this concept in their instantaneousness…. love declared before knowing….except that theirs was built on projection and fantasy, love for an imagined me rather than the actual one. God’s instant love is not projection. He loves me before I’ve earned it precisely because He already knows me completely (Psalm 139), which is the reverse of loving a stranger you’ve invented. He loves the real thing, fully seen already, in advance.

I’ve long understood that when I tell God I love Him, it’s something like a child telling a parent the same.

A parent’s love, at least in theory, runs deeper than the child can fathom. Loving in ways the child isn’t even aware of, providing and protecting behind the scenes, holding a whole dimension of care the child hasn’t the capacity to perceive. The child truly loves back but according to the limits of a child’s understanding.

This maps onto God with striking accuracy. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him; for he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:13-14). His love accounts for our limitations in a way ours never fully accounts for His greatness. When I say “I love You, God,” I’m the child offering back a fraction of what I’ve received, according to a capacity that can’t come close to the source.

And this reframes my son’s “you know” entirely. He can’t yet say the words, for reasons rooted in a childhood that wounded his ability to speak them. But he loves me according to his capacity, and transmits it however he can: the smile, the nod, the velcro grip. If God receives my stunted, partial love with delight because He knows my frame, then surely I can receive my son’s wordless love the same way. The absence of the word is not the absence of the thing. God, of all beings, knows the difference between the two, and honors the love that can’t find its words.

But then the question fractures, because love clearly means different things in different relationships, and the differences aren’t trivial.

It’s ordinary to tell a spouse how deeply you love them. Say the same words with the same intensity to a friend, and you’ll get a strange look. Family love differs again: the love for a sibling, a parent, a child, each carrying its own expectations, its own permissions, its own terminology.

The Greeks were right that these are genuinely different.

• When Jesus restores Peter, the famous exchange turns on agape and philia, distinguishing sacrificial love from the love of friendship (John 21:15-17).
• Storge, the natural affection of family, is assumed throughout.
• Eros has its own honored place: the Song of Solomon exists in the canon precisely to celebrate the love between spouses in language no one would use for a friend.

So love is more like “one house with many rooms,” and you don’t behave in the kitchen the way you behave in the bedroom.

The love within marriage for example includes a self-giving intimacy and exclusivity that would be just completely inappropriate in friendship. Friendship love (philia) has a mutuality and chosenness that family love, which you’re born into rather than choosing, doesn’t require. Family love carries obligation in a way friendship doesn’t. Each love (or “room”) has its own proper expression.

And yet they share a foundation… or they should.

Paul’s description in 1 Corinthians 13 love is patient and kind; it does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude; it does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful (1 Corinthians 13:4-5) was written to a church, about how members of a community should treat one another. Not to spouses. Not to lovers. The definitional passage on love in all of Scripture is about how ordinary people in a congregation ought to love each other.

Which means the deepest description of love isn’t reserved for romance at all. Its really within every room in the house. The patience, the kindness, the refusal to insist on your own way…. those belong as much to friendship and family and neighbor-love as to marriage.

Which brings me to the neighbor.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31), second only to loving God.

I will say, God is generous with what this love must not do. It doesn’t envy or boast, isn’t rude or resentful, doesn’t rejoice at wrongdoing. It gives us the outline of harm avoided. And it offers a few load-bearing principles: the Golden Rule, do to others as you’d have them do to you (Matthew 7:12); the parable of the Samaritan, which defines “neighbor” as anyone in need whose path crosses yours (Luke 10:29-37); the summary that love is the fulfilling of the law because it works no harm (Romans 13:10).

But the nuances inside loving this particular neighbor in this particular moment I’ve noticed is left… pretty open

And I think this is deliberate. Because love that could be reduced to a complete rulebook wouldn’t be love; it would be compliance. The Samaritan wasn’t following a checklist. He improvised in responding to a specific wounded man on a specific road with specific need. Love had to be discerned in the moment, not referenced.

This is why I think the command can be simple and the practice frustratingly complex. Loving my neighbor might mean confrontation in one case and silence in another, generosity here and boundary-setting there, presence for one person and distance from another. The principles are fixed; the application requires wisdom, attention, the willingness to actually see the person in front of you. Love, it turns out, is less a definition to memorize than a person to become…..which is why 1 Corinthians 13 describes love’s character rather than listing its rules. It tells you who to be, and trusts that such a person will know what to do.

I’m still wrestling with that. But what this study has shown me is how thoroughly we’ve mangled a word that God uses with perfect precision.

The men who “hoped to love” me had it backwards: love in God’s grammar isn’t a future conditional earned through evidence; it’s a present reality given before the earning. The daters who declared it instantly had the timing right but the object wrong: loving a projection, not a person, where God loves the actual real thing already in advance. My son, who can’t say it, and my God, who never stops saying it, have taught me the same lesson: the word and the thing are not the same, and it is the thing that saves.

So I’m learning to hold the word more carefully than the people around me have. To distrust it when it comes cheap, to receive it when its not spoken, and to measure all of it against the one love that defines the rest of it.

• The love that died for enemies.
• The love that knows my frame and remembers I am dust.
• The love that fills every room of the house and yet can’t be reduced to the rules of any of them.

I may not ever hear the word “love” on this earth in the way God has defined it as.

But I’m coming to understand that I have been loved, relentlessly and from before the beginning, by the only One whose use of the word never lies.

And that love is teaching me, slowly, how to recognize the real thing when it’s present but silent… and how to refuse the counterfeit, however loudly it announces itself on its own accord.