Love at first sight.

People love to tell you what love “should” look like all the time.

Sometimes it comes with confidence, like they’ve figured it out. Sometimes it sounds like rules dressed up as wisdom, with timelines, signals, formulas, red flags, and green lights lining up like road signs. And sometimes, if I’m honest, it feels like all the “illy goose people”, while well-meaning, hand out definitions they borrowed but didn't live in, from somewhere else.

I've listened and not hahah for a long time.

I tried to fit love into shapes people said were normal. 

It was a strength not to need anyone. 

Maybe desire meant certainty.

Maybe peace meant no conflict. 

Over time, I thought love meant ease.

Oh, how wrong I was. 

But the more I lived, the more those definitions cracked. They felt incomplete, like puzzle pieces from another box.

And somewhere along the way, I started asking a different question:

If God is love… how could love be anything other than His love?

For years, I read Paul's words in Corinthians like a checklist, a set of moral instructions for better relationships.

But then something shifted.

What if this passage iisn'tonly telling me how to love?

What if it's showing me who God already is?

Because if God is love, then every line becomes revelation.

Love endures long and is patient and kind; love never is envious nor boils over with jealousy, is not boastful or vainglorious, does not display itself haughtily.

It is not conceited — arrogant and inflated with pride; it is not rude (unmannerly) and does not act unbecomingly.

Love — God’s love in us — does not insist on its own rights or its own way, for it is not self-seeking; it is not touchy or fretful or resentful; it takes no account of the evil done to it — pays no attention to a suffered wrong.

It does not rejoice at injustice and unrighteousness, but rejoices when right and truth prevail.

Love bears up under anything and everything that comes, is ever ready to believe the best of every person, its hopes are fadeless under all circumstances, and it endures everything without weakening.

Love never fails — never fades out or becomes obsolete or comes to an end.

(1 Corinthians 13:4–8 AMPC)

As Yahweh reveals Himself more and more throughout the Word, I begin to see that these lines feel less like commands and more like revelation.

Love is kind.

God's strength always moves toward mercy.

Jesus touches lepers, restores failures, and blesses children. Kindness isn't an add-on to holiness; it is one of its clearest expressions.

Love is not boastful or proud.

The Creator kneels. True humility flows from knowing who You are so deeply that proving it becomes unnecessary.

Love does not insist on its own way.

Jesus in Gethsemane — fully able to choose differently, yet saying, “Not My will.””Divine love doesn't dominate; it yields for the sake of redemption. It yields to the will of the Father.

Love keeps no record of wrongs.

That line alone dismantles so much of how I once thought about love. God remembers my sin no more — not because it didn't matter, but because His mercy is stronger than my failure.

Love rejoices with truth.

God's love is never shallow or sentimental. It doesn't ignore reality; it heals through truth, not around it.

Love bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

This echoes Yahweh's long patience across generations — the God who keeps covenant when everyone else breaks theirs.

And then the line that steadies everything:

Love never fails.

Not because circumstances always unfold the way I want, but because God does not stop being who He is.

The more I sit with this passage, the more I realize Paul isn't painting an impossible human ideal. He's revealing the character of Yahweh — made visible in Jesus.

Love looks like breath given freely.

Love looks like a garden prepared before humanity even asks for it.

Love looks like Yahweh walking with people in the cool of the day, not because He needed them, but because He wanted them.

Even after the fall, love doesn't vanish. It follows. It guides. It is comforting. 

I used to think love was proven by perfection or doing the right thing all the time. 

Scripture shows me it’s revealed by pursuit.

I see love in the long stories—patient in promises that survive failure.

Abraham stumbling forward, Moses arguing with God, David running from his own consequences, prophets speaking into silence.

Love keeps showing up.

Sometimes as a correction. Sometimes, as patience. Sometimes, as a whisper, saying, Come back.

The love of Yahweh isn’t fragile. It doesn’t withdraw at the first sign of weakness. It stays long enough to heal.

And honestly, that unsettled me at first. Because that kind of love doesn’t fit the performance mindset I lived in for so long.

If I’m honest about where everything changed, it wasn’t in a relationship or an idea.

It was when I realized love at first sight, and every time after that: Jesus on the cross.

Not metaphorically. Not conceptually.

Just the reality of it.

The Son of God chose mercy when He could have chosen power. 

Absorbing rejection instead of returning it.

Loving people who misunderstood Him all the way to the end and forgiving them. 

He died for them, too.

I realized something standing there in that moment:

Love wasn’t asking to be admired. It was being given away.

That was love at first sight for me.

Not fireworks. Not certainty.

Sacrifice.

And suddenly every other definition felt smaller.

I remember reading my man St. Augustine’s reflections and stumbling over his idea that love is out of order. 

That sin isn’t always loving bad things, but loving good things in the wrong order.

I didn’t hear it as a formal discipline or an academic framework. It felt more like someone finally realizing that the puzzle piece they had been missing was under the couch for years.

I realized I had been asking love to carry things it was never meant to carry.

I wanted an achievement to tell me who I was.

I wanted relationships to anchor my worth.

I wanted success to quiet fear.

But love was never meant to start with me arranging the world correctly. It started with letting my loves be reordered in Jesus.

Not by force. By recognition.

It’s why Jesus tells us to name our treasure. Because when we name our treasure, we’ll realize where our map is leading us. 

Now, when people tell me what love should look like, I listen.. sometimes

Because love, as Scripture tells it, looks like:

Yahweh searches for Adam after hiding.

Ruth staying when leaving would’ve been easier.

Hosea loving beyond betrayal.

Jesus washing feet hours before the cross.

A tomb that couldn’t contain love.

Love looks like patience with process.

Love looks like truth with kindness and grace.

Love looks like staying open when it would be easier to close off.

And maybe most surprisingly,  love looks like being loved first.

I used to think love meant finding the right person at the right moment, with the right feDon't.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think God reveals love through people, moments, and emotions. 

Now I see that love starts with the right Person 

Receiving His love before chasing anything else, and gently asking my heart each day:

Is Jesus truly my treasure today?

When I look at Jesus on the cross, love stops being so complicated. 

If God is love, then loveisn'tt whatever 2026 culture says it is.

 It isn’t whatever fear whispers whenI'mm tired. 

It isn’t what awards or achievements promise when I feel behind.

Love is His way.

And the more I walk with Him, the more I realize that love isn't something I can manufacture. 

I read it and then spread it to all my neighbors. And everyone is our neighbor. 

I wonder if there are so many Instagram reels and TikToks telling us what love should be because we keep searching for it in fragments.

But the cross is the full revelation of love.

Everything God has done, and everything He is, reveals His love completely.

Before we send a Valentine’s note, post the perfect caption, or make plans for the day, maybe we should pause and read the greatest love story ever known: the love of God for us.

Everything God has done and is is a full revelation of His love.

The love that moves toward us before we understand it.

The love that gives instead of takes.

The love that endures, forgives, and never fails.

A love that is active, and not passive.

If we want to know what love looks like, we don’t have to guess; we only have to look at Jesus.

And once you see love there, self-giving, patient, enduring, the rest of life begins to align, like puzzle pieces finally returning to the image they were made for.