Description Of "Unconditional Love" Writing Category

Our "Unconditional Love" writing category is a new place about love.  Most will be personal stories of when individuals have touched the lives of someone else by giving unconditional love.  Many of these stories will be about how someone married has stuck with a difficult partner, giving them unconditional love and allowing them to mature until God has turned their marriage into a wonderful marriage in the end. 

This category is big enough for other kinds of unconditional love stories and writings too.  Like stories of helping neighbors, or helping the victims of hurricanes, or feeding the hungry, or visiting the widows and orphans, or helping build a house for the homeless. 

Like writings with questions about unconditional love.  Like are non-Christians capable of giving unconditional love?  Like writings of what is unconditional love?  Like writings of how long can a person give unconditional love before they give up and feel used?  Like writings of how long does God expect us to keep forgiving and keep respecting our spouse when they do not return love to us? 

As Christians, the way we show God we love Him, is primarily by obeying His commandments.  And the greatest of all God's commandments is to show God's love.  God's love is unconditional love. 

Sometimes it hurts to give unconditional love and not receive love in return.  Some wives and some husbands give unconditional love to their spouse for an entire life time without feeling love in return.  It is difficult to not lose respect for your spouse when you give them unconditional love and do not get love in return.  Bitterness can creep into the marriage when love is given with expectations of love in return.  But we have emotional needs as humans that need to be met and it is next to impossible to give love and not expect love in return.

Jesus said to love our enemies.  If we are to love our enemies we surely should love our spouse too.  We need encouragement from others.  We need to hear stories of how a married couple gave unconditional love to their spouse and never lost respect for their spouse, and then in the end their spouse changed and loved them back.  God can change our spouse's heart.  God can change our heart. 

We need to somehow give up our own expectations and give love to our spouse unconditionally, and never lose respect for our spouse.  My daughter and I were talking about how this would be the only way to save a bad marriage.  She said, "Daddy, I guess what you have to do if you are married to a bad person, is to keep making up excuses for why he is the way he is, so you can keep respecting him and keep forgiving him when he doesn't meet your expectations."  She said, "That is what I do with my boy friends.  I am very loyal to them and once I decide I like them, I am very committed to them and they can do no wrong."  I said, to her "You are right.  That is the way you should do once you are married." 

It has been said, "Love is blind."  And may be what God wants us to do with our spouse when they don't meet our expectations.  We need to love them so much that we don't see their failures.  The Bible teaches that "love covers a multitude of sins", meaning that when you love someone you can overlook their short comings and weaknesses.

But this is difficult to do.  We need encouragement in our marriages.  We need to hear those success stories of how God has healed broken marriages and how God had made strong marriages stronger, when couples show each other unconditional love.

And we need to hear stories of unconditional love in the family and outside the home.  We are to love our neighbors as our self and we need to hear stories of how we have loved our neighbors and how they have been blessed and changed by our unconditional love.