Christmas Season brings on the spirit of giving. I would like to give you a gift. Give you a better understanding of love and forgiveness!

So much is written about love. The love is everywhere - on TV and in the movies, on bookshelves and in music. It's all about these wonderful feelings you get when you're "in love" - sticky warm mushy feelings, because isn't that what love is all about? Feeling "in love"? Or is it?

Love is NOT just a feeling. Love is a decision, love is a choice. Love is as volitional as it is emotional. Love is what you DO for someone when you don't FEEL like loving them. My definition of love is "Love is what you DO for someone when you don't feel like loving them."

Think about it. Love is easy when it feels good. It's so easy to love someone when you FEEL like loving them! But what do you do when you DON’T feel like loving them? What do you do after a long hard day at the office or after the kids have been running you ragged? What do you do when your beloved has hurt you? What do you do when you simply can't find any love in your heart? What do you do when the endorphins eventually wear out, as they always do?

Love is about unconditional acceptance, about accepting the person for who they are, without attempting to change them to whom you want them to be. Unconditional acceptance does not mean unconditional approval! Far from it! You can hate the behavior while still loving the person. I may hate your practice of bolting, for instance, but that does not mean I cannot love you too.

Love is not easy. Love may be one of the most difficult decisions you will ever have to make. Oh no, I'm not talking about when you first meet someone and everything's just peachy keen swell - that's the easy part. What I'm talking about is after the "honeymoon" is over, and you're sitting at opposite ends of the couch with vacant stares wondering just how the heck you ever got stuck with each other! This could happen after seven weeks or seven months, and it happens very often after seven years. But what about those times when you feel nothing? Give up? Walk out? Get divorced?

The Greeks have three words for love - "eros", "phileo", and "agape". We all know what kind of love "eros" is. "Phileo" is brotherly love, or love between friends. You can get lots of great feelings with the former, and you can achieve a lot of compromise with the latter and the good feelings that go with friendship. But what is "agape"? [And like it's pronounced "a-GAP-ay", eh?]

Agape is the Highest Form of love - it is love that puts the needs of the beloved ahead of your own needs. It is the kind of love that always works in the best interests of the other person, regardless of the consequences to you! You’ve got to give, without expecting to GET! You have to die to self to give your love! True love is totally accepting, and absolutely unconditional. If you know God, then you will know that this type of love is consistent in his nature. He himself actually uses love to define His own identity. If you choose to love someone when you don't feel like loving that person, please believe me when I tell you that the feelings will come later.

Have you ever thought or spoken these words? "I will love you if only you will ----" What you have just offered is not love! It may be a manipulation! Manipulation is at the heart of approval-based love. Have you ever struggled to "earn" the love of someone? Well guess what? You can't "earn" anyone's love! Love is a free gift, without condition! All you can do is earn their approval.

Loving someone is risky, extraordinarily dangerous, even. Harder perhaps than A4, because with aid climbing if you know what you're doing, you will probably make it to the top of a sick aid pitch without dying. But with love, you don't get anything close to that kind of certainty of outcome! Quite the contrary! You set yourself up for the greatest risk of all - the risk of being hurt. You have to become completely and totally vulnerable - for you cannot experience love unless you are prepared to become vulnerable! And therein lies the risk! If you are unwilling or unable to become vulnerable, then you can never experience true love.

The only way you can experience true love is to hand your heart on a plate to the person you love. This requires a lot of good luck, and may be impossible since you will have to find someone stupid enough to put up with you. But as climbers, I assume we are all risk takers by nature. We would rather go down in a flaming holocaust and fail in love after having given it our best shot, rather than choose the far more ignoble path of "playing if safe." We climbers purposely choose the road less traveled, and we seek out difficulty for its own sake, because we know that with Great Risk comes Great Reward. Some of us risk far more in the hope of achieving a far greater reward.

So now you've risked it all, and you've tied into the sharp end of the rope and run it out on lead. You are so run-out you are looking at the most epic winger you have ever taken. You have devoted your life to your beloved, and you have made great personal sacrifice in the best interests of your beloved because you realize that this is what love requires. And now your so-called "beloved" has hurt you. Enormously. A hurt so deep it crushes the life out of you, and breaks your heart. You feel pounded like a copperhead into a crack, beaten and twisted and manipulated and hurt, and you just don't know if you can stick with it any more or not. This is not a minor spat - this is a life-altering hurt.

What if the person who has hurt you is the one you love the most? What if it is your spouse? Your parent? You hope that they will apologize. You hope that they will repent, which means that they will feel deep sorrow and regret over what they have done, and that they will resolve not to continue in this wrongful action, and they will try to right the wrong they caused you. But what if they choose not to apologize or repent? What if they just don't care? What if they are dead? How many people still bear burdens in their heart over past wrongs committed by people long since dead?

What if the person who hurt you refuses to apologize or repent? Here is an idea that I am sure will surprise you: when someone hurts you, the best thing you can do is to forgive them! So now you're thinking, "What?! Forgive them?! Are you NUTS?! Do you have any idea WHAT this person did to me? I could never EVER forgive them for what they did to me! That's like letting them off the hook for free! I want to make them PAY for what they did to me!"

What do I actually mean by "forgiveness"? What I mean is that in order to forgive, you must consciously decide to accept the hurts that the other person has inflicted on you, no matter how great those hurts are, and choose to let them go scot-free without ever planning to knowingly seek retribution. Please note that I never suggested that forgiveness has anything to do with forgetting.

By forgiving the person who hurt you, you have released their grip on you. They no longer have any power over your heart because you have forgiven them! They can only hold power over you as long as you hold on to your un-forgiveness. Un-forgiveness leads to bitterness, and the only one you hurt by being bitter is yourself. Nobody will like you, either. Or they will find you difficult. Un-forgiveness can lead to unresolved anger which will poison your relationship as surely as anthrax will poison the post office. To get on with life, you must forgive the person who hurt you, no matter HOW BIG the hurt was! So you see, there is actually a selfish aspect to forgiveness.

There is a spiritual side to the forgiveness issue, too. Christians don't have a choice - they have to forgive. Jesus made that pretty clear right after the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:14-15, “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

OK, so you say you "got it" when I tell you that you need to forgive those who hurt you for the sake of your own mental, emotional and spiritual health, because you only end up hurting yourself if you don't. But you tell me, "I just can't DO it! I just don't FEEL like forgiving! I don't think I could ever feel forgiveness in my heart for what that person did to me! It just wouldn't be fair for me to forgive them!"

Well, thank God life isn't fair. If it were, we'd all end up roasting in hell! Thank God that He sent Jesus to die in our place – how fair is THAT, eh? But my point is this - you CAN forgive them, no matter what they did. Forgiveness, like love, is a choice, it's a decision. You must make the choice to forgive someone, especially if you don't feel like forgiving them. If you wait until you feel like forgiving someone, forget it - it'll never happen! You have to make that choice to forgive them, and you have to do it NOW - because the only person you hurt by delaying is yourself!

And it doesn't matter how terrible a thing they did to you! They could have murdered your child or sexually abused you, but my answer remains the same - you must forgive them for your sake, not theirs. And please believe me when I tell you that the feeling of forgiveness in your heart will eventually follow, and when it does, you will feel the power of their hatred release its grip on your heart and your heart will be at peace possibly for the first time in your life. This takes time, lots of time, sometimes years. It requires a continuous effort to keep on forgiving. It is not easy! I never said it would be. Trust me, I know.

In 1994 my wife chose to leave me. Because I pursued some caving, climbing and fishing adventures, I was not constantly at home beside her. I was not like her father who was always at home beside her mother. I did not want her to leave because I loved her and because I believe in the sanctity of the family. I did everything I could to win her approval so she would return to the marriage - I even took all of my fishing reels, the smallest essential component to my fishing system, and gave them to my boss so I could “prove” to her that I couldn’t fish!

In retrospect I now know that unconditional love was very much lacking in our marriage, and much of my then-wife's love for me was approval-based. After she left, of course I felt betrayed and was very, very disturbed. I was a wreck because I loved her so much! I could not eat or sleep for two weeks and lost fifteen pounds from my frame in less than a month, though there was an unanticipated benefit - with the stress-induced weight loss and with me finally having the time to train for climbing instead of hanging around at home doing whatever she told me to, I was able to flash trad 5.11's for the first time in my life!

During those turbulent months, I began to learn about love and forgiveness. I realized that what I do does not determine my identity, but rather it is my identity that determines what I do. I began to give in and to accept the free gift of what had ALREADY BEEN DONE for me rather than trying to do it on my own. It did not take a rocket scientist to realize that if I were to have any chance at freeing my heart from its bitterness, I would have to choose to forgive my wife, regardless of whether she returned to our marriage, and you all know she did not, even though at the time I hoped that she would. So that was the choice I made in August 1994, and by about September 1995 I actually began to feel the forgiveness in my heart. Her grip on my heart was nearly gone, and I become a free man by my own volition and determination. And of course with God's help.

So tell me, are you someone who has lost hope? When you read my words, did your heart hurt? Do believe that you will never feel true forgiveness? But FEAR NOT, you of a broken heart, there is Good News for you! If you would like to find the will to forgive, then you will need to know you are loved and accepted unconditionally. This Christmas season, look no further than a little baby born in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, and in Him, YOU WILL FIND HOPE. Jesus is the perfect example of God’s love for us, that God loves us so much he’d give his ONLY son up for this. There is no love more sacrificial than that demonstrated by Jesus’ willingness to die on the cross. [It’s not like, Jesus FELT like dying, eh?]

Want to find out how to have lasting LOVE and FORGIVENESS? . . . CLICK HERE