The Wedding of Catrin Marie Steffens to Christopher Michael VanDenBerg

What is love?  Chris and Catrin have heard this question several times in the last few months as we have met together.  We’re accustomed to thinking of love as an emotion, something we feel.  As we opened Scripture and looked at the picture it paints of life in this world, we learned that love is not an emotion.  Love is an action; love is a verb.  Love is certainly tied in with emotions, but love manifests itself in action.  Love demonstrates itself in how we act towards one another.  That’s what St. Paul was driving home in his great “love chapter,” 1 Corinthians 13.  Love is patient and kind, it does not envy, it keeps no record of wrongs and all the rest.  Chris and Catrin, the love you feel for one another today will change.  Ask your parents.  The love they have for one another now is different from the honeymoon phase puppy love they had years ago at their own weddings.  The emotional side of love is now deeper, rooted less in how one makes the other feel and more in how much both realize that the person to whom they are married is the fulfillment of God’s Word in Eden: “It is not good for man to be alone.  I will make him a helper comparable to him.”  All of us who are married can speak to that.  Love changes and matures.  Love as an emotion changes.  Love as an action does not change.  The actions themselves may change, but love will always be manifested in its purest form as an action.

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