'Daddy, do you love the kitten?' she asked

Since around last Christmas, we’ve been planning on getting kittens. We delayed in part because we need another needy little being in our home like Jaws needs another swimming lesson. But since the girls are getting slightly less likely to torture, and even more slightly likely to actually care for such a critter, we finally took the plunge this summer.

So Pepper "Loveball" Bennie, sneezy orphan Siamese kitten, moved from the San Bernardino City Animal Shelter to the San Bernardino Mountains, a move up in the world both in the mile of elevation she gained and in the tonnage of love she now bears. She joins my wife and me as one of the few who know the joy and the torment of living with our three daughters.

It’s hard to know whether it is ignorance or ignoring of the signs of feline displeasure that leads kids to love a cat in ways that push the limits of the animal’s endurance. Melía holds her for durations that would try even a dog’s patience. Eager to enrich the kitty’s life with adventure on the day she arrived, Ashlyn tried throwing her for distance. Brielle still pleads not-guilty for holding her captive in the treasure chest all day yesterday while we were at the fair.

We always hurt the ones we love, don’t they say?

Maybe a week after we got Pepper, Melía asked me this:

“Daddy, do you love the kitten?”

Let me defend myself before I tell you how I answered. I’m really clear that “love” is this holiest of words that has been profaned by overuse. Call me a snob or an idealist or whatever you must. But for me, true love is a sacred act of will that I define something like M. Scott Peck does in The Road Less Traveled: “the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

Love is God.

And if I teach my kids anything about anything, I want it to be This.

So I'm all cautious about my answer, which, I was certain, had the heinous power to distort her idea of love for eternity.

"Not as much as I love you, my Melía," I hedged, circumspect as all get-out.

"What?" she asked, appalled at how the soul of any sentient being could be anything but filled with love for her kitten. "Why don't you love our kitten, Daddy?"

"Well, it's just...." I was tempted to bust out my arsenal of words that mean love but don't mean Love, words like cathexis and affinity and like a whole bunch. But I was smart enough not to. "I do love the kitty. But it's a different kind of love than how I love you. A much smaller, much less important kind of love than I love you with, Melía, because I love you so MUCH."

Was that a sign of relief I saw on her face? "You do love our kitten, Daddy. But a diffwent kind of love."

Relieved? Yes, I think she was.

But still a little worried about my soul.

Love ain't easy

There are plenty of songs telling us what love supposedly is.

• Love is a Many Splendoured Thing
• Love Makes the World Go 'Round
• Love Gets Me Every Time
• Love is a Rose
• Love is a Battlefield
• Love Stinks

Appealing as all these metaphors may be, this last week I've been going with the theme of Faith Hill's song, "Love Ain't Like That."

No, love, love ain't like that.
Love ain't that easy to define....

Maybe amongst the cacophony of declarations of what love is, a few hints at what it is not could be refreshing. Perhaps more than another seed planted, the overgrown forest of love definitions needs a little pruning.

My kids have begun this pruning, teaching me that love ain't about making people happy, for example. They've showed me that love ain't blind either. And today, I will try to convince you (as my lovely ladies have managed to convince me) of this shocking insight: Love ain't easy.

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Love is not easy.

You knew that already.

But did you ever catch yourself thinking something was wrong in a love relationship because it wasn’t going smoothly? “This is too much work,” I’ve thought. “This is not fun. If I have to strain so hard, do I really love this person?”

As we anticipated Brielle's birth, Rachelle and I knew we would feed her breast milk. It was natural. It was God’s plan. It was convenient, easy, simpler than buying and toting around formula. (Ladies, why the sardonic laughter?)

Brielle was born, and within minutes my wife learned how painful and difficult nursing could be. We went to “lactation consultants,” a profession that sounded laughable to me. Who needs consultants to be able to do this simple thing that God created us to do? Women have been doing it for millennia. It is core to the survival of the species, basic to who we are as mammals. It should just flow, you know?

Why should love be any different? It's natural. It is this simple thing that God created us to to, and people have been doing it for eons. It is core to the survival of our species, basic to who we are as children of God. It should just flow, right?

Here’s what I've found "just flows": affinity, attraction, lust. Liking someone comes easy. Loving them, not so much.

M. Scott Peck separates love from “cathexis,” which explains attractions to the opposite sex, the instinct for cuddling pets and pinching babies' cheeks. Cathexis come naturally. Animals naturally want to mate. I naturally like people who like me.

And then there is love. It takes effort. It is work. It’s difficult. As core as it may be to God’s design for us, we still seem to need “lactation consultants” of sorts to help us do it right—therapists, teachers, parents, pastors, books, friends and every other resource that helps us do this very tough job of loving.

Peck goes as far as to say that real love cannot begin until cathexis is over. Again, Peck's definition of love: "the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." He says I can’t really begin the work of this sort of love until the natural attraction has faded enough to make it difficult to extend myself to nurture your spiritual growth. This could mean that right around seven years, when so many couples are “falling out of love,” thinking divorce, it might be just the right time to actually begin to love.

God shows this kind of supernatural love:

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? (Matthew 5:43-47)

Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:7-8)

He did not come “being nice,” trying to make us merely happy—although his love calls us to grow toward true joy.

He did not die in blind ignorance of our evil—although his death can wash it away.

His love was anything but easy—it cost him everything.

Love ain't easy. But it's worth it. Loving three preschoolers ain't easy. But they're worth it.

Crazy thing is, loving me ain't easy either. But somehow, God thinks I'm worth it too.

Love ain't making people happy

Thirty years into life, I started to really learn about love. My kids are teaching me. The next few days I'll write about things that my kids have helped me learn that love is not.

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Love ain't about making people happy. I should have known this just by reading the Old Testament, where a God who is love defined does all this stuff:

• God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden of their dreams.
• God promised a son to Abraham and Sarah and then made them wait till their Geritol-taking years to have and enjoy him.
• God allowed his chosen people to be in slavery in Egypt centuries before Moses delivered them.
• God led a generation of those people in 40 years of wilderness-wandering, allowing them to die off before taking them to their Promised Land.

"But that's God, Old Testament edition. It's a whole new deal when Jesus comes, right?" Wrong. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. The Bible also tells me this:

• Jesus told a man grieving his fallen father to let the dead bury their own dead, to come follow him now.
• Jesus allowed his friend Lazarus to die, knowing the pain it would cause Mary and Martha, even though he could have gone to heal him before death.
• Jesus proclaimed, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.”
• Jesus said to his buddy Peter, “Get behind me Satan!” and later, “You will deny me thrice.”
• When his friends and following wanted him on the throne in Rome, Jesus went to the cross on Golgotha.

God is love. If this is how a God of love rolls, there must be more to love than making people happy.

Part of the problem is my human disability in receiving love, that "break in the cup that holds love inside of me," as singer-songwriter David Wilcox puts it. (Complete lyrics to "Break in the Cup" are worth reading.)

"I try so hard to please you
To be the love that fills you up
I try to pour on sweet affection,
But I think you got a broken cup....

I cannot make you happy
I'm learning love and money never do
But I can pour myself out till I'm empty
Trying to be just who you want me to
I cannot make you happy
Even though our love is true
For there's a break in the cup that holds love
Inside of you."

This is a big relief to me as father. If love meant making my kids happy, what a failed, loveless father I would be! Come to our house and you'll notice at least two things: (1) we love our kids; (2) one or more of them is almost always crying, fussing, whining, pouting or otherwise displaying signs of unhappiness.

This can only make sense if love is about something much bigger than making people happy.

My freshman comp teacher at Pacific Union College, Nancy LeCourt, once said, "Love does not mean always being nice." That was her take-home from a book I read for her class called The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck. There, Peck defines love as "The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."

If I buy into this (and boy do I ever), then my job as a loving parent is not to make my kids happy. It is to extend myself to nurture the growth of their soul. This often means saying "no" to them--and to my own compulsion to please people--so they can grow.

I have a need not only to be loved, but to give love and know that it has been received. When I love expecting to make my wife or kids happy, I feel angry and rejected this inevitably does not work out. And then, hoping to avoid this, I withdraw my love.

But when I love with the intention of helping one of my girls grow, I realize that growth is difficult, a rocky road that winds its way through sorrow on its way toward joy. So if my love ain't makin' her happy, it might be just the kind of love she needs.