Garden of Love is written for ordinary people like you and me - tired, emotionally exhausted, overstretched, and spiritually drained from doing too many good things. Life can take any number of turns without warning. Life might be normal now, but this could change without much notice.
Garden of Love 18 Authors have helped to shape the messages in this book.
Their contributions bring much to the table but the common thread that ties it all together, is love.
Everyone suffers from some physical and emotional pain in life. Medical help can bring relief to physical injury and illness. However, emotional hurt requires something different. The pain that is brought by the loss of a loved one, business failure, a broken marriage, friendship or even the uncertainty of COVID-19 is not simply medicated. Meeting the need of those who are struggling with inner pain requires a heart of love in expressing words and acts of compassion and comfort.
The sacred book defines love this way:
If I speak with the eloquence of men and of angels, but have no love, I become no more than blaring brass or crashing cymbal. If I have the gift of foretelling the future and hold in my mind not only all human knowledge but the very secrets of God, and if I also have that absolute faith which can move mountains, but have no love, I amount to nothing at all. If I dispose of all that I possess, yes, even if I give my own body to be burned, but have no love, I precisely achieve nothing. (1 Cor. 13:1-3)
The principle that can be gleaned here is that doing good must be rooted in love. We can be successful in all we do and be able to fulfil our dreams but if we do not do it with love, we have missed what really matters. There is no value in the things we are doing if they are not done in love. Generosity without love is empty. The greatest deed done without love is nothing. The only right motive for doing what we do is true love.
