Romans 13:8-10

"Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.
For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."
Romans 13:8-10


This is cool.  What we owe each person on this earth is love... and, as long as we understand what God means by love, we'll be okay.  One of the things that it means is in the last verse... love worketh no ill to our neighbors.  So sometimes (I am again reminded of Till We Have Faces... good book) what we think of as love isn't really... sometimes we hurt people and we think that we needed to out of love... or we try to manipulate people in some way out of "love" ... those things aren't love.  they might be shards of love that have been twisted to suit our purposes, but they aren't the real thing.  Love is what God is talking about here... we won't break any of the commandments, because we know that it will hurt our neighbors... people that we love.  We won't destroy one neighbor in preference to another, because we love them all.
So many movies have come out that talk about love in a twisted way... that we should be willing to sacrifice ourselves and everyone and everything else for "love" ... for that one person, that one feeling.  That's twisted.  Love is a strong emotion, and necessitates commitment and risk and action... but not destruction.  We should never have to choose hurting one person in order to love another... and we should never have to choose between God and love... because God IS love.  Whenever we have to make that choice, then we are only getting a little piece of love... not the real thing.
The Queen in Till We Have Faces lived her whole life thinking that she had truly loved some of the people in her life, and saw afterward that what she had thought was love wasn't at all... I remember taking an undergraduate seminar when I was a Psych major... the whole class was on love... we wrote a definition at the beginning and discussed it the whole semester, and then another definition at the end.  Everything I knew then I would just throw away and start over... love takes a long time to learn, and in 10 years I’ll probably look back and scrap a lot of the definition I have now... but learning that love is never destructive is always a positive thing. :)  And maybe someday I’ll get the whole definition down. :)