I've heard both pastors and students try to explain this by saying that love is not a feeling, it's a choice. But I'm afraid that's still consumerism talking. [...]
But love is not a choice -- or rather, it is not only a choice, just like it is not only a feeling. Love is a way of life for the long haul (again, think of love for your children) and its presence in our hearts is what Christian doctrine calls a virtue -- an enduring pattern of feeling and thought, choice and action and perception. Love involves all these things, including choices -- many, many choices over the course of a lifetime, made in light of the people and things you love. But of course it also involves feelings -- how could it not? When we look at the children we love, playing or sleeping, we are filled with tenderness and delight. What loving parent doesn't have such feelings?
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