What Love Makes of Us

Dedication 

For Liessa, whose life has been a quiet and unwavering witness of unconditional love. From the beginning of our union, her love for me because of Christ never lost hope. Through her, I have come to see love as something lived, embodied, and incarnational. God used her love to show me what formation looks like over the long arc of a life. 

Reflection One: Love as Formation 

I once imagined a figment of what love is. After forty-seven years of marriage, you might assume I would know its contours by now, but I am still only skimming the surface. 

Early in life, love was sentiment and mutual benefit. Later I assumed it was altruism. Neither was wrong, but both were incomplete. 

With time, longevity revealed how shallow my early definitions were. Love became formation — and formation is slow. 

What has surprised me most is that love will always be active but not always reciprocal. The truth of love is revealed in its motion, not in its return. 

I once believed love was something I expressed. Now I see that love is also something working on me — shaping, enlarging, maturing desire, and refusing transaction. 

Love is a formative force of personhood. Affection may begin love, but formation deepens it. 

The real work of love is not in being loved, but in becoming one who can love. 

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Aphorism “To love is to become more fully a person.” 

Endnote “We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) 

Reflection Two: Love as Revelation and Participation 

There was a significant turn in learning how to love beyond what I had previously imagined. A little over a year ago, Liessa asked: “How do we love people who are diametrically different from us?” 

My instinct was to answer with theology, but I didn’t. I said, “I don’t know. But I’ll think about it and let you know.” She was asking for lived truth, and so was I. 

I didn’t realize that God was already answering the question. 

In Spain, a conversation with a stranger opened a door I didn’t know I needed. Heaven’s living reality of love broke open. Love is not merely virtue or ethic. Love is a Person. It must be lived. 

Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13 became witness, not recital — lived by the Spirit in the one who surrenders. 

I was not learning love to know it better. I was learning love to live it. The Spirit transformed my formation, not by knowledge but by enlargement of being. 

I could not love this way by agency of self. The Spirit is the agency of love itself. 

The question no longer lingers. It ceased to be a problem to solve. The answer is held in living — in encounter with the One who is Love. 

I am left not with a concept to defend but a Person to surrender to. 

What I could not see earlier was that love is not achieved. Love is lived because Love Himself is near. The Spirit does not assist love. The Spirit enables love. 

In this way, love is not simply what we offer another. It is the life of God given through us as we surrender. We do not initiate that movement. We participate in it — drawn into union with the One who loves without measure. 

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Aphorism “Love is lived because Love Himself is near.” 

Endnote 1 Corinthians 13 (lived, not defined). 

Reflection Three: Love as Fullness and Communion 

If love is lived and not merely admired, then the life that emerges will not remain centered on the self. Formation widens into participation. Participation widens into fullness. 

Love emanates from God through Jesus — the One who is love and the One who lives it through us. Authentic love requires surrender and humility for the sake of another’s personhood as much as my own. 

Union does not end in union. It widens into communion because love cannot be contained. Love makes room. Love honors difference. Love allows personhood to be revealed rather than managed. 

In that widening, I am discovering that love is the consummate reality of living that gives meaning and purpose. To live love is to live in the truth of how we were created. 

The image of God is not merely rational or moral capacity — it is the capacity for communion. To love is to participate in God. To participate in God is to discover the fullness for which we were made. 

Fullness is not completion. It is participation — communion lived in the ordinary through the nearness of God. Some of this fullness is tasted now. Some is yet to come. Love continues its work because Love Himself continues His work. 

If love has formed me and is lived through me, then communion becomes the horizon of my life — stretching into the life of God, where love is both the beginning and the fulfillment of our becoming. 

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Aphorism “Communion is the fruit of union.” 

Endnote 

1 John 4 — God is love (lived). 

Copyright © 2026 Ron Randle. All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced without prior written permission, except brief quotations for noncommercial purposes permitted by law.