Katie Weakland, a biology professor at Bethel College in Indiana and a former InterVarsity staff member, knows what interests students. And she knows there’s no better time than Valentine’s Day to talk about true love.
In her lecture “What is True Love?” delivered recently at an InterVarsity-sponsored event at Bowling Green University. Katie talked about TV shows, movies, internet dating, and why everyone wants to be loved. Then she talked about Mary Lou and Jim, a couple she met when she was a teenager.
Jim became paralyzed from a stroke after he and Mary Lou had been married for just a few years. He was totally dependent on Mary Lou, and she cared for his every need because she had promised to love him until “death do us part.” Katie asked the students, “How much do you want to love?” It’s a question many have never considered before. “We often get caught up in finding ‘the one’ rather than considering how we can become ‘the one’ for someone else,” she said. She told them that the love Mary Lou had for Jim is similar to the sacrificial love God has for each of us.
“Jim was completely paralyzed,” she said. “He couldn’t move at all from the neck down and could not talk, yet all his mental faculties were intact. So for years he couldn’t even say ‘thank you’ to his wife, until he got a voice synthesizer. Then the first thing he said was to repeat “I love you” for hours and hours to Mary Lou.”
Katie believes that without God we are all like Jim, “broken and fallen and can not even respond to God because our spirits are dead. But God, like Mary Lou, did not give up on us – he pursues us with his love and gave us the ultimate gift by sacrificing himself on the cross.” There’s a lot of talk about love around Valentine’s Day. Katie believes the Bible is the greatest love story of all time.
“In order to find the source of love we must look beyond ourselves and our surroundings,” she said. “As a biologist I have seen first hand that nowhere in nature do you find unconditional sacrifice for the sake of another. Even mother animals will only risk their lives up to a certain point – and only if it is beneficial for them to do so. In this world it’s all about survival of the fittest. In God’s Kingdom it’s all about sacrifice for the weakest. Life in God’s Kingdom is not about survival – it’s about death – dying to one’s self so that others may live, and our supreme example is Jesus.”
