Love has been coming up a lot lately. Malcolm Gladwell says love, along with 10,000 hours of practice is what makes a genius a genius: not some rare gift.
Sasha Dichter says love is at the core of our ability to connect, persuade, and motivate folks to do stuff.
But love can be tricky. It seems to have something to do with the type of love we're talking about. In Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, Karl Barth differentiates between Eros and Agape.
He writes love as Eros is "the primordially powerful desire, urge, impulse, and endeavor by which a created being seeks his own self-assertion, satisfaction, realization, and fulfillment in his relation to something else."
Agape also involves the "total seeking of another", however, in Agape, "the one who loves never understands the origin of this search, but as an entirely new freedom for the other one, a freedom which was simply bestowed on him and consequently was originally alien to him." It causes us to strive for each other.
It seems like lots of people seek ministry in an Eros type of love. What can this do for me. Which is cool. We can work with that.
But people seeking ministry out of a sense of Agape type of love seem more rare. Better maybe? Or not?
Maybe just more rare.
"I'm not sure why I'm doing this. As best I can tell, it's what God wants of me."
Seems to simple or pointless or...small, or something.
