What is True Love?

Imagine that you are in a dark room.

In this dark room there is a small bright light. It’s beautiful and strange, yet for some reason you know what it is. The light is small, but it is bright, brighter than any light you’ve ever looked at. You never knew light could be so bright.

The light is bright and beautiful that you forget that you are in a dark room. All you see is this perfect little light, shining strongly in to your soul. In that moment, everything makes sense, even if you can’t put the experience in to proper words.

But it’s only a glimpse

That’s all you get, and then you are in a dark room again. 

While you would love to look at the light again, something about the burning sensation in your eyes says that it is time to stop. The darkness is not particularly comfortable anymore, but you know that you cannot look at that little bright light anymore, no matter how beautiful it is.

So you flip the switch

And you are surrounded by light instead of darkness

This light is different though. Unlike the little bright light, this light has a mix of every wavelength in the spectrum. It’s not nearly as bright, but the massive influx of this mixed light overwhelms you. Panicked, you shut your eyes.

But the darkness you create is not enough to keep out the light.

As a result, you end up with a massive migraine.

This is my every day experience with the microscope in my lab. No matter what I do, the bright fluorescent light in my lab short circuits my mind, and once I’m back in natural light, my head burns with the broad spectrum of light.

As a result, I typically spend a half hour or so with sunglasses on in lab after I use our microscope.

Now this may seem like a highly specific experience, but I would like to invite my Dear Readers to look at this from a different perspective.

Think of a person who just saw the truest love in the universe: God’s love.

The darkness which surrounds us all, whether it be our sin, our crosses, or even our loneliness, seems completely normal. We are immersed in it, unaware of what may come some day. Then all of the sudden, we see a bright light, something strange yet beautiful. We know it, but we don’t entirely understand it. We forget our darkness in the beauty of this bright light of love.

He comes to us, and He invites to encounter Him in the darkest rooms in our hearts.

We can’t ride that high forever though.

No matter how Holy a person is, we cannot take the entirety of God’s love, not for very long, and certainly not in this life. Then we are in the darkness, and all we want to do is be in the light again. 

So we flip the switch on our hearts, and we let the light in.

But the love of this world, the light that we see around us every day, is merely an imitation of the beautiful and perfect love that comes from God. It’s imperfect, and it doesn’t look like the love we saw in the moment when God spoke to us. Our love is not as strong, and it has many different expressions.

But it’s still love.

Love is real, because God is real.

However, because the world is so strange and difficult, we try to run away. We close our eyes, and we bring in our own darkness. We ask for people to save us, to turn out the light on our hearts. We beg for the real light to come back.

It is not until we put on shades and look in to the light that we realize how beautiful our imperfect love can be.

You see, when you put on shades, you notice the contrast between the darkness and the light. It’s a subconscious acknowledgement, and yet it is clearer than our understanding of the bright light. The love of this world, while not the same as God’s love, is in fact, a contrast to the darkness that is our sin, our crosses, and our loneliness.

By understanding that there is darkness in the hearts of everyone, we can see just how beautiful their own unique emission spectrum is.

Have you noticed the particularly interesting part of this experience?

The light comes through the darkness. We put on the shades which reveal the darkness in this world, and yet the light penetrates this darkness. The contrast exists because the light will always be able to make through.

No matter how dark the world may seem, love will always be there.

Because God is always there, even if He doesn’t look like you expect Him to appear.



Christ’s love, revealed on the Cross, is the light which penetrates the darkness. It saves us from our own deaths, from our darkness, from our sin, from our own crosses, and from our loneliness. The love which we receive from God Himself is what allows each of us to shine our little lights. They are not as bright and beautiful as those of Jesus, but they are real.

No one is perfect, but the love that resides in each of us is perfect.

And then, once you’ve accepted that, you can take off the shades.

Some of my Dear Readers have beautiful faith, and so perhaps they do not need shades anymore to understand the beauty of imperfect love and how God reveals His love through each person. However, that does not mean that our experience is over. 

It means that we have to help those who stand where we once stood.

But how?

We have to help them put their shades on. For until we can see how God’s love penetrates even the darkest soul, we cannot understand just how much He loves us. Some say that bringing darkness in to the light is a bad thing. They say that it makes us look bad, that it discredits our faith.

But how can we say that Jesus saved us if we don’t know what He saves us from?

It is ok to share the darkness we have felt with those who are overwhelmed by imperfect love.

It is ok to let them know that there is nothing to fear.

It is ok to love them.

I’ll never forget the day that someone gave me a pair of shades. They were sitting with me on a couch, and they were sharing all of their darkness. It was this extreme vulnerability which gave me the darkest pair of lenses I had ever worn.

I saw love.

It was not my love, but God's love which rested in this little soul. While our love is not exactly like His, our love reflects God's very presence in our lives. Had I not been a witness to this vulnerable moment, I might not have seen just how stark the contrast is between God's love is from the darkness of this life.

And as I walked in to the light with my new shades, I recognized just how bright each little soul was around me.

God is with us

All of us.


I took off the shades, and life is much brighter. While not everything is as it should be, and it won't be until this world ends, true love is with us in every day.