Love

Love is not nodding at the ache and pretending it is wholeness.

It is not looking at a wound and naming it healing just because we are afraid of the truth.

Love kneels in the ashes and dares to say, this is not how it’s meant to end.

Love does not sanctify decay.

It does not baptize the poison just because the starving soul calls it relief.

If I saw a hollow-eyed friend collapsing from hunger, I would not hand them arsenic and call it mercy, even if, for a fleeting moment, it numbed the hunger pangs.

Yet this is the language of our age.

Lies renamed as compassion.

Confusion crowned as courage.

Bondage, wrapped in glitter, handed out as freedom.

And I feel the grief of it in my chest.

Watching a world so desperate to feel anything that it will drink death if death tastes sweet.

Watching those made in His image swallow narratives that callous their hearts.

Love is not passive.

It is a holy resistance.

A burning refusal to let pain disguise itself as peace.

A trembling voice that stands in the ruins and whispers, There is more than this. You were made for more than this.

It is not cruelty to name the poison.

It is cruelty to watch someone die of it and stay silent.

I am learning that love does not always sound like agreement.

Sometimes, it sounds like warning.

Like weeping intercession.

Like a shaking voice saying, I love you too much to pretend this is freedom.

I love you too much to clap for what is slowly killing you.

This is the kind of love Christ showed us,

Not polite, but piercing.

Not convenient, but crucified.

Not enabling our chains, but coming to break them.

Give me that kind of love, Lord.

Not the kind that avoids discomfort…

but the kind that bears a cross.

The kind that risks misunderstanding.

The kind that aches, bleeds, and speaks…

even when silence would be safer.