Unconditional love

MANY of our readers have requested us to reprint a column we published last year. The topic of the column was “Unconditional Love,” Based on the feedback we got from our readers, this is one subject matter that the world needs to understand and appreciate once more.

We are obliging our readers’ request. Here is that piece we wrote and which appeared at the Sunday Bulletin on Christmas Day last year: “Sige. ‘Pag bad ka, ‘di na kita love.” How many times did we hear those words when we were growing up? We heard them mostly from parents and from yayas. We heard them during our formative years – that part of our life when we took everything said by adults as gospel truth.

Those words planted two devastating myths in our minds.

First, that love is something we have to merit or deserve.

Second, that love is something we can purchase.

As children, we tried to hold on to that conditional love through cute looks and good behavior.

As adults, consciously or subconsciously, we tried to buy and to deserve that conditional love with power, with fame or with money. I guess we do that because adults know good behavior is impossible to sustain – and even harder to remain cute.

Trying to buy and deserve conditional love can drive us crazy. The conditions keep changing. The purchase price keeps getting higher. The standards, inconsistent. There are people who end up believing that they will never find love nor someone who would love them.

“I am not lovable” is something many of us may have entertained in our heads most of our lives. “Ang hirap mong mahalin,” is something that may have been told us over and over again.

I believe those are also some of the biggest lies we have ever heard.

And, they are also some of the reasons why I believe in Christmas.

Christmas, for me, is the single biggest reason why it is a lie that we are not lovable and that we are difficult to love.

In fact, we are so easy to love that God did not hesitate “to give us His only Son so that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life.”

God must be so madly in love with us that He would go out of His way to become Man, suffer the imperfection of being one, and die a humiliating death just so He can have us back in his loving arms.

We must be so beautiful in His eyes that He did not mind being born in a stinking stable at a time of political chaos and social turbulence in the country he chose to be his birthplace.

He must be so passionately in love with us that he would choose to overlook our sinfulness.

As one Christian author wrote, “it would have been easy to die for a good man”. But to suffer and die for sinners like us? Only a God who is so enamored by Man would do such a thing. As the bible says, “while we were yet sinners, God loved us.”

Today, my wife, my daughters and I will stand before the manger scene. As we do so, we will remember that God’s love for us is unconditional. It is a love we can never deserve nor merit. We cannot earn it. We cannot buy it.

That scene of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem will remind us that His love is freely given. It is for us to accept and receive. Today, my prayer would be that I may learn to love as God loves: unconditionally.

When I do so, I help others feel and understand that they can be loved and are loved.

I guess that counts a lot in a world aching and longing for love.

In 1965, the famous composer Burt Bacharach wrote a hit song recorded by popular singer Dionne Warwick. The most memorable line of that song goes like this:

“What the world needs now is love, sweet love. No, not just for some but for everyone.”

I guess it’s more than just “sweet love” we need. We need love that asks for nothing in exchange. Love freely given. Love without condition.

It takes the grace of Christmas for one to be able to give that kind of love.