Scripture’s powerful messages about love offer a number of opportunities for reflection.

TODAY IS MOTHER’S Day. In a rather direct sense, your mothers are among the most significant people you will ever encounter in your lives. You can add fathers to that ultimate group of associations, too. Depending on your culture, chances are you may carry the names your parents picked for you or gave you legally your whole life long.

We could all use a little more love. Wars, conflicts, fights, and feuds abound in our world, churches, communities, and homes. It is a scandal how little effort much of humanity and most individual humans put into loving one another. 

In prayer we ask for the grace to obey God’s command to love, and for mercy when we do not.

To know someone is to love them, the old saying goes, but as scripture points out in so many words, the reverse is also true: To love is know.

When our lives proclaim the love of God to others, and the forgiveness that is ours in Christ, we unleash a mighty power. People yearn for what we have, and the power of God’s Spirit is awakened in them.

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others. —John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)