How many legs does a dog have?

“If you call the tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? 4, just because you call the tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” –Honest Abe Lincoln

Neale Donald Walsch writes in Conversations with God, “Words are really the least effective communicator. They are most open to misinterpretation. Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are not the real thing. Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.”

My high school religion teacher taught that Love is to give of one’s self for the betterment of another.  To give.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because this has become my definition of love.  When I say, “I love you,” I’m saying that it’s not about what I get.  I just want to make your life better.

Now, let’s be honest, there are more than a handful of people out there who think they can boil Love down to that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you really like someone.  Ok, maybe that’s real enough for them, but what if that feeling goes away?  Then what?

It reminds me of a song from Fiddler on the Roof, where Tevye sings to Golde about their decades of life together, and he finally asks, “Do you love me?”  What strikes me about this is the idea that they’ve been together for years and have never told each other that they love one another.  They just did it.  They loved each other the whole time and never said peep.  But the point is that they loved each other.

This isn’t the chicken and the egg; it shouldn’t be a dilemma.  You can say the words and hope that they’ll come true, or you can do the behavior and find the words later.  For my money, the latter sounds like a better idea.  Calling something love doesn’t make it love.  Love is a verb, it has to be active.  At the end of the day, it’s about choices.

Will a piece of paper or a ring or a vow stop someone from cheating?  It depends on how much that person values that piece of paper/ring/vow.  From my experience, it’s not the paper nor ring nor vow that makes the difference,  it’s simply a person making a choice.  Choosing not to indulge a short term desire, but to honor a long term love.  I guess my experience has taught me that the label can only mean something if the choices of the people involved give it meaning.  And a person’s actions, as a manifestation of who they are, what they care about, and what’s in their soul, is the only thing that counts.

Love isn’t totally devoid of feelings, but there’s a caveat:  It’s not about your own feelings, it’s about the other person’s.  Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Love is about the things we do to make the other people in our lives feel good.  And when you’re doing that with your whole heart and soul, it’s not subject to interpretation.