PART 3 - Love Endures
by Dedzidi Ladzekpo
Lastly, one of the things I learned about love is that, when
it’s real, it truly endures in all circumstances and through all trials. “Love
never ends”… right? It’s so easy to memorize those words from 1 Corinthians 13,
to hear them at the end of a wedding’s Scripture reading, but it’s another thing
to understand their implications and live them.
Of course, love’s endurance is something we will never be
able to embody on our own strength. However, with an active kind of love, it’s
important to realize what it entails. Whether it’s pointed toward your
boyfriend, your best friend, or group of friends, it means you’ll have to give
things up to sustain it. It means that there are times when you’ll be late to a
class or lose some study time because you have to help a friend through what’s
on their mind. It may even mean that you’ll have to stay up until sunrise
letting them cry on your shoulder. It means that you’ll have to sacrifice what
may seem like a lot of time and effort, but in the end, you’ll see that what
seems like a loss will be an immeasurable gain.
In my three years here at Cornell and my twenty years on
this earth, I have lost some friendships I thought would last for a lifetime.
However, in it all, I’ve learned my longest lasting friendships are
characterized by this sense of endurance. We both know without a doubt, at
least in this present time, that there is an unspoken rule –we will do our best
to be there and to stay there.
If anything, I hope this shows that love, in all senses of
the word, is hard work. Regardless of what society says, it doesn’t come
easily. The Christian life is just like that – hard work in light of the
perfect work that Jesus Christ did on the cross. In that, we see the perfect
display of love – a love for us, broken as we came, but now, in Him, no longer
remain. As in the book of John, “greater love has no one than this, that
someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). What the Lord did was
the greatest and most perfect manifestation of what love does. We now live in
full view of this fact hidden in the midst of that famous chapter in 1
Corinthians: “For we know in part … but when the perfect comes, the partial
will pass away.” Therefore, what makes love beautiful, what makes it desirable,
is not its characteristics but its actions that last forever. There is so much more to say about love,
but let me leave you with this thought - when you find yourself searching for
love unknown, it may be time to search a little differently. Search for
something that acts boldly, search for something that never ends. I know I did.
All Bible references
are taken from the English Standard Version.
This is the third part
of a three part series by Dedzidi Ladzekpo. Dedzidi is an Economics major at
Cornell University, where she is a women’s small group leader for Cru Cornell.
In her free time, she also expresses herself on her blog, dedzidilives.tumblr.com.
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