Love Feels. Love Chooses. Love Acts.
Updated: Oct 4
“Love never fails.” 1 Corinthians 13:8
It started with a song.
Recently, I was listening to some old love songs when I came across “Yeh Dooriyaan” from the 2009 movie Love Aaj Kal. I had never watched the movie, but something about the song stirred something deep inside me.
I found myself weeping.
So I searched for the story behind the song.
The movie follows Jai and Meera, two people who love each other but find themselves moving in different directions. Their relationship is shaped by a very practical understanding of love: they care for each other, but when their careers and lives begin pulling them in different directions, they decide to let each other go rather than hold each other back.
Jai believes this is what love can look like.
Until he meets Veer.
Running alongside Jai and Meera's story is Veer's story with Harleen a love from another time, built around waiting, pursuing, choosing, and refusing to simply walk away when circumstances become difficult.
At first, Jai doesn't understand Veer's way of loving.
To him, it seems almost foolish.
Why wait?
Why pursue?
Why fight so hard for someone when life is telling you to move on?
But as Veer tells Jai his story, something begins to change.
Perhaps Veer wasn't simply showing Jai another kind of romance.
Perhaps he was showing him another definition of love.
Jai had learned to think of love as something that could be felt deeply and still released.
Veer showed him that love could also feel deeply and choose.
It could wait.
It could pursue.
It could act.
And somewhere between the two stories, Jai begins to understand something about himself and about Meera. He eventually realizes that letting go had not erased what he felt for her. And when he finally understands what that love means to him, he doesn't only feel it.
He chooses it.
And he acts on it.
That was the part that stayed with me.
Because perhaps love isn't only about what we feel.
Sometimes love releases.
Sometimes love waits.
Sometimes love chooses.
And sometimes love acts.
And suddenly, the story wasn't only about a movie anymore.
It reminded me of my own life.
When Love Speaks Different Languages
When I returned to Pakistan on September 18, I was coming back after experiencing a much bigger world. My horizons had expanded. But the world my family had known had not necessarily expanded in the same ways.
And when two worlds grow differently, sometimes they clash.
We had different expectations, perspectives, ways of communicating, and even different ways of expressing love.
For a while, I knew that I loved my family, but I didn't always feel that my love was being recognized as love.
Then I realized something.
Perhaps I was loving them in a language they didn't always understand.
And perhaps they were doing the same with me.
There were things my family did because they loved me that I sometimes thought, “I don't need this.”
But maybe what I really meant was, “This isn't how I need to be loved.”
There is a difference.
Two people can genuinely love each other and still miss each other's love because they express it differently.
That realization changed something in me.
There were difficult and chaotic moments. Moments when our differences felt very real, and staying required patience, understanding, sacrifice, and grace.
But through those moments, I realized something about love.
I didn't only feel love for my family.
I chose them.
And then I acted on that choice.
I stayed.
I kept showing up.
I kept loving.
I kept trying to understand.
And they loved me too, often through the ways they knew how.
Where Did I Learn to Love Like This?
But then I had to ask myself a deeper question:
Where did I learn to love like this?
Because honestly, I didn't have enough of my own love to give.
Before I could stay with people in their messy and chaotic moments, I had first experienced what it meant for someone to stay with me in mine.
Before I could carry someone else's burdens, someone had already met me in mine.
Before I could keep showing up when things were difficult, someone had already shown me that love doesn't always walk away when things become difficult.
And then I realized
I had already been loved like this.
Not perfectly by people. Not always in the ways I expected.
But by Someone who had been teaching me, long before I understood it, what love really looks like.
Someone who came near when I was far away.
Someone who stayed when I was struggling.
Someone who carried what I could not carry myself.
Someone whose love wasn't simply spoken to me, but demonstrated.
His name is Jesus.
And suddenly, so much of what I had been learning about love made sense.
Jesus didn't love humanity from a distance.
He came near.
He entered our broken world.
He carried our burdens.
He experienced human pain.
He stayed through suffering.
And He acted.
His love was not merely something He felt.
He chose.
And He acted.
Love Feels. Love Chooses. Love Acts.
That is why I keep coming back to this:
Love feels.
Love chooses.
Love acts.
Perhaps part of growing in love is not only learning how to love someone, but learning how to recognize love when it comes in a form we didn't expect.
That doesn't mean every painful circumstance is God's love, or that every hurtful behavior should be called love.
It means we may sometimes need to pause and ask:
Am I only recognizing love when it looks the way I expected it to look?
Because love can look different across people, generations, relationships, and seasons.
But real love does not remain only an emotion.
It moves.
It comes near.
It sees.
It chooses.
It acts.
And perhaps that is why Scripture says:
“We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19
Because before I could choose love, Love had already chosen me.
And that brings me back to the words that started this whole reflection:
“Love never fails.” 1 Corinthians 13:8
Maybe that is what I am still learning that love is more than a feeling.
It is something we receive.
Something we recognize.
Something we choose.
And something we live.
Love feels.
Love chooses.
Love acts.
Love never fails. ✝️
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