Lighting the Flame of Love – February 10, 2002
Throughout the world’s many countries and cultures, love is the human family’s universal language of understanding. When love’s bright flame burns within us, it warms our hearts and illuminates pathways to a better world.
Because God has woven the tapestry of humanity with threads of many different colors and lengths, one of life’s most important questions becomes, “Will we love each other the way He loves each one of us?”
Despite our individual differences and national borders, there is no denying that all mankind is indeed connected. When we reach out in love, our lives become interlocking circles that connect us with friends across the street and neighbors around the world.
When love guides our efforts, the map we draw of humanity contains no solitary islands. As John Donne described the cartography of the human family, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”1
Technological wonders like television, jet airplanes, and the Internet have brought the world together in ways our ancestors never dreamed of. As individuals, and as nations, there’s so much we can share if “love one another” is the motto of our global village.
Our efforts can kindle the flame of human love in remarkable ways. One loving heart can inspire many others. In 1936 German athlete Loots Long offered a suggestion that helped his American rival Jesse Owens qualify for the Olympic long jump final. Later, when Owens outdistanced him for the gold medal, Long was the first to congratulate his opponent.
“You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn’t be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I feel for Loots Long,” Owens said. Long’s kindness brought the world closer together and made mankind the true winner that day..
As a noted French scientist once predicted, “Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love, and then for the second time in [history], man will have discovered fire.”2
By first loving us, our Heavenly Father has ignited the fire of human love; it is a flame that will burn ever brighter as we reach out in love to one another.
Program #3782
1. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 15th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980), 254.
2. Teilhard de Chardin, cited by Barbara B. Smith, “Love Is Life,” The New Era, February 1986, 50.