What is love?

Through my own thought processes at institute last night, this subject came up in my head. Love of God, to be more accurate. They were discussing the subject of the sacrament. One of the quotes given during that said, "true soul acknowledge of its deep spiritual significance." We discussed the by soul we mean body and spirit. We discussed the shortcomings that don't allow us to fully partake of the sacrament. For some reason, my thoughts started to center on my love of God. It seemed to me that if I could love God with all my heart, might, mind, and strength, then I would be able to fully partake of the sacrament.

So I got to thinking what is love of God? Does it have to be emotional level? Spiritual? Perhaps even an intellectual level? I ask this because I tend to find myself less emotionally involved in God than in other ways. I'm not sure why. I can talk of the atonement and of all that Jesus Christ did for us, and understand it intelectually to some degree, feel some spiritual significance to it, but emotional disconnected from those events. You think with something of such magnitude, you would feel something of an emotion. Yet that never seems to be the case with me. At times, yes, I do feel emotion towards these thoughts, but as far as a constant emotional feeling of love, no.

There was a point in my life about two years ago that I really tried to understand what love of God felt like. I made it a goal to pray every night for that and to feel of God's love. As with most goals I set, they tend to fail, but on those nights when I did truly set out to fulfill this goal, I did feel of God's love, but couldn't seem to get that feeling to remain with me always. Yet again, I felt some emotional investment into loving God, but spuradically.

As I compare this with, say, my love of music. I know I am emotionally invested, intellectually invested, perhaps not spiritually. But I can truly say I love music without question where I can't say that about God. So now I try to focus of what the differences are.

One of those differences is time. As I think on it though, few people spend more time on God than they do with their careers. Maybe it's the approach that matters. As I've gone through my studies in college, I never really acknowledged God as part of my studies. We are asked to pray always, yet going through my college career, I never did that. Doing things with God in mind seems to be one of the things that I can do to make sure I spend as much time with God as I am my career. Come to think of it though, for the past two weeks I have been doing that, granted more on the fear that if I don't truly rely on God in all of my decision making at this point, life will be even less happy than what it is.

I guess along the same lines, one of those differences is reliance. I never allowed myself to rely on God, where there were times I would rely on music. This created my emotional investment to music moreso than God. Again the past two weeks have been different though. Although admittedly, even with this change, it will still take time to make that change permanent and actually emotionally invest in the Lord. Sometimes I feel the Lord allowed everything I rely on to be taken away so I have to rely on Him.

So who knows? Maybe with the changes I have made these past couple of weeks with help me to understand what love of God is and to help me to truly say that I love God, where I don't think I can fully say that right now. We'll see.