Love is Caring More About Another's Happiness Than Your Own

Love is caring more about another's happiness than your own. After reading this article this morning about Randy Pausch, the Carnegie-Mellon professor struggling with Pancreatic Cancer and author of "The Last Lecture," these words just stuck in my mind.

I started mentally testing out this definition. Is it true about the people I say I love? Is it true about the people who say they love me? How does it fit with John 3:16 which describes God's love, or the two great commandments, "Love God," "Love others?" Seems to work pretty well!

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more useful this short but practical definition of love became. I thought about how it applied to marriage, to parenting, to grandparenting, and it works. I thought about how it applied to caregiving, and found that it applies to lots if not all of the tough situations and decisions caregivers face.

I guess some would argue with the "caring more" part, wanting it to be more "caring as much." And I probably wouldn't quibble about that. And I know some would want to define "happiness" to give it their own twist (hopefully not "This is for your own good -- it hurts me more than it hurts you!"). And I probably would quibble some with folks trying to do that.

It just seems to be to be a good working definition of love to apply every day to everyone. Now that's the challenge!

Liberal or Conservative?

I was reading an interesting blurb yesterday from Fred Smith's Breakfast with Fred -- about how our life views and even basic beliefs are shaped by whether we believe that people in general are essentially good or essentially evil. His point was that if we believe that people are essentially good, then we adopt a liberal political philosophy and believe that if we provide education and a lift up, then everything will be okay. Conversely, if we believe people are prone to be evil, then we will adopt a conservative political philosophy focusing on regulation and maintaining order.

While I think his point is interesting, I'm sure it is too simplistic, and probably not universal.

But I found myself today wondering out loud how Bart Whittaker, who is on trial for orchestrating the murder of his mother, brother, and father so that he could inherit one million dollars got to the point of being able to even think of doing that. It just seems so unnatural, so evil, so opposite of what I would expect from anyone. Maybe there's more to what Fred had to say that I wanted to accept.

So maybe I do believe that everyone is basically good rather than evil. That doesn't make me a liberal, but it does probably make me a moderate rather than a conservative.

And in today's political environment, since I don't seem attracted to those labeled either liberal or conservative, that's okay with me.