CONTENTS

• JUST VISITING
• FEATURE ARTICLE: "Learn to Speak Your Mate's Language"
• "Gems of Wisdom About Love"

JUST VISITING

Make no mistake about it, loving is hard work. We all want to be loved. We all say that we would like to show love, but when someone says, "here's how you do it," we argue with the teacher. Gary Chapman and Willard Tate are two teachers of love from whom I have learned much. Although their thoughts about love suggest great wisdom, the only totally competent love teacher is Jesus Christ.

It's one thing, however to know the mechanics of speaking the language of love; it's quite another to get love out of your head and into your life. It may be the toughest assignment we face, but the rewards are worth it. This issue concentrates solely on different aspects of learning the practice of love.

Norman

I'll never forget my first visit to New York City. We found ourselves standing on the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue without any sense of direction. A helpful Manhattanite sensed our confusion and asked whether we wanted to go "uptown" or "downtown." He might as well have spoken to me in Swahili. Somehow he pointed me to the United Nations building. Later, we rode a bus back to the garage where we had parked our car. I suddenly realized I didn't know where to get off the bus. In desperation, I approached the bus driver. Supposedly we both spoke English. In reality, he spoke Brooklynese and I spoke Texanese. That day I learned something about the difficulty of communcation between two people who share a common language.

In marriage, you can even speak the same regional dialect and fail to communicate. Recently, I came across Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages. Gary Chapman (the family expert, not the host of TNN's "Prime Time Country") opened my eyes to an entirely different way of thinking about marriage communication.

Chapman believes that love often dies in a marriage because we don't realize that we speak different love languages. He thinks everybody has a primary love language and identifies five of them. They include

1. words of affirmation
   
2. quality time
   
3. receiving gifts
   
4. acts of service
   
5. physical touch.

When you get right down to it, learning to love is a fairly complex thing. My friend, Willard Tate conducts "Learning to Love" seminars all across the country. Willard says if he could pass along just one thing to the people who make up the next generation, he would say, "They should know the key to life is the ability to establish and maintain long-lasting relationships." Learning to Love p. 13). Willard is right on target, but we don't automatically know how to love. How can we learn the language of Love? Well I would recommend books like the ones by Chapman and Tate, but I suggest that we look to an even more fundamental source.

The apostle John saw the need to teach people the art of loving long before our time. He said, "But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did." (I John 2:5-6). Jesus knew how to speak all the languages of love and there's no better place to go for instruction.