Charlie Kirk’s Biggest Legacy Will Be Inspiring Young People To Get Married
Charlie understood that the ideas a culture rewards eventually decide how people date, whom they marry, and how they raise their children.Charlie understood that the ideas a culture rewards eventually decide how people date, whom they marry, and how they raise their children.Dolly Parton never had to leave her husband to find herself
When Dolly Parton came to Nashville in 1964, finding a husband was the last thing on her mind. She was 18 years old, newly arrived from the mountains of East Tennessee, and clear about what she had come to do: “I was here to become a star.”
Then a young man with sky-blue eyes drove past the Wishy Washy Laundromat.
Reading about Parton and Dean makes you suspect we've forgotten how to disagree inside a marriage.
Parton was outside waiting for her clothes when 21-year-old Carl Dean spotted her, called something out the window, circled the block, and came back. She talked to him because he was “drop-dead handsome,” but she was also surprised that he looked at her face while they talked — “a rare thing for me,” she joked in her 1994 autobiography, “Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business.” More seriously, she remembered that Dean “seemed to be genuinely interested in finding out who I was and what I was about.”
Dean came back every day for a week. When Parton finally had a day free for a real date, he took her to his parents' house, where his mother was putting supper on the table.
“Fix this girl a plate,” Dean announced. “She's the one I'm going to marry.”
'In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)'
This was news to Parton, since Dean hadn't yet told her he loved her. But two years later, on Memorial Day 1966, they married in Ringgold, Georgia. The marriage lasted until Dean's death in March 2025, just shy of 59 years.
By then, the penniless girl doing her laundry at the Wishy Washy had become one of the most famous women in the world, while Dean had spent most of those years avoiding the public attention that followed his wife everywhere. Parton liked crowds, travel, and attention; Dean liked cars, tractors, and staying home. She became so famous that strangers took tour buses past their house; he was so private that some fans suspected she had invented him.
Their marriage is particularly interesting at a time when we're accustomed to hearing divorce described in the language of personal liberation. Celebrity divorce announcements that once might have contained at least a trace of embarrassment now tend to read like graduation speeches: Two people have decided to “choose themselves,” embark on “new chapters,” and continue their respective “journeys.” Whatever else has happened, we're assured that tremendous personal growth is underway.
Parton would have been an excellent candidate for this kind of liberation. She was financially independent, professionally ambitious, frequently away from home, surrounded by attractive men, and married to someone whose personality and interests were almost comically different from hers. They had no children, and by the time divorce became commonplace, she certainly didn't need a husband to support her.
'Just the Way I Am'
Yet there is remarkably little sense in Parton's accounts of her marriage that staying with Dean required surrendering some essential part of herself. Few entertainers have constructed a public identity as singular or pursued a career as independently as Dolly Parton did. She managed it while remaining married to the man she met outside a laundromat at 18.
The potential conflict between marriage and career appeared before the wedding. Fred Foster, the head of Parton's record label, asked her to postpone getting married because her career was beginning to move, and he worried that a husband might hurt her appeal to male record buyers. Parton told him she would wait, then she and Dean secretly drove to Ringgold to get married anyway.
Her mother went with them, having made Dolly a white eyelet dress and veil and wrapped a little white Bible in lace and field flowers for her to carry. At the courthouse, an official offered to marry them on the spot, but Parton balked. “I want to get married in a church,” she told him.
That presented a problem: They would have to wait until Monday and couldn't afford a motel for the weekend. So they drove back to Nashville, returned three days later, and were married at Ringgold Baptist Church. Their honeymoon lasted about two hours: Dean had to work the next morning, while Parton had to get up at 3 a.m. for a television appearance.
The competing demands of Carl and career didn't go away after the wedding, but the couple arrived at an arrangement that would probably horrify anyone who thinks a healthy marriage requires sharing all one's interests. Dean eventually owned an asphalt-paving company and wanted almost nothing to do with show business. According to Parton, he saw her perform only once.
'I Will Always Love You'
“My marriage is separate,” she once explained. “I have my life on the road and my life with Carl. He has seen me perform, once. But we have our own life at home — without music people.”
Their differences extended to ordinary domestic life. Parton was spontaneous; Dean liked routine. She spent money; he was frugal. She wanted more physical affection than he naturally gave. She traveled constantly while he preferred staying home. None of this prevented Parton from describing the arrangement with considerable satisfaction.
“It works out well between me and Carl,” she wrote. “We both get what we really want. We both have the freedom to come and go and do as we please.”
As she also put it in her autobiography, “Carl is the only man I could live with all of the time, because I don't.”
Freedom comes up repeatedly when Parton talks about her marriage, but not in the way the word is usually used in discussions of unhappy marriages. She and Dean weren't free from each other. They seem to have felt remarkably free with each other.
That required trust. Parton spent much of her professional life around men, and rumors about her love life were inevitable. Sometimes friends or relatives actually approached Dean to tell him his wife was involved with somebody else.
“Well, I would think less of any man that didn't fall in love with her,” Dean would respond.
Parton believed he could take the rumors in stride. “He knows that I will always come home,” she wrote.
RELATED: Dolly Parton is dead at age 80
'Mommie, Ain't That Daddy?'
This wasn't a marriage without jealousy or hurt. Dean was badly shaken early in their relationship when he learned that Parton had been sexually involved with another man before him, an experience that helped inspire her 1968 song “Just Because I'm a Woman.” A few years later, a pretty bank teller began paying so much attention to Dean that he developed a newfound enthusiasm for trips to the bank. Parton poured her jealousy into writing “Jolene.”
Jealousy may have been an inevitable byproduct of the mystery each retained for the other. “They say that opposites attract, and it’s true,” Parton told People in 2015. “We’re completely opposite, but that’s what makes it fun. I never know what he’s gonna say or do. He’s always surprising me.”
She had said much the same thing more than 20 years earlier. “I am still learning about him to this day,” she wrote. “I think that's the way a relationship should be.”
Reading about Parton and Dean makes you suspect we've forgotten how to disagree inside a marriage. He didn't like show business; she built her life around it. He liked routine; she liked spontaneity. She spent; he saved. She wanted more affection than he naturally gave. Yet neither seems to have taken every difference as evidence of incompatibility — or proof that the other was preventing some truer self from emerging.
Carl didn't ask Dolly to give up the career she wanted, and Dolly didn't demand that Carl become part of the Dolly Parton enterprise. He didn't have to learn to love awards shows, and she didn't have to stop touring. They seem to have understood something increasingly unfashionable: You can be profoundly different from the person you married without having married the wrong person.
Dean also believed in Parton's ambitions before there was much evidence that he should. When money was still tight, the couple bought 75 acres in Brentwood, Tennessee. Parton told him they needed the land for privacy because someday tour buses would drive past their house.
“He accepted that notion without question, showing that he had faith in my dream too,” she recalled. “This made me love him even more.”
'Here You Come Again'
The tour buses eventually came, but Dean never showed much interest in joining the attraction. In her autobiography, Parton recalled a visit he made to the set of “Nine to Five,” where Jane Fonda met him without initially realizing that the handsome stranger was Dolly's husband. Fonda later told Parton that she had praised Dolly to him, saying how sweet she was and how much she enjoyed working with her.
“Well, she's an angel,” Dean said.
Fonda agreed.
“No, you don't get it. She's a real angel.”
Parton was touched when Fonda repeated the conversation. “It's just like him to say it to somebody else, figuring I'll never hear about it.”
Dean had known her before the rest of the world did, meeting her on the day she arrived in Nashville with a load of laundry and the certainty that she was going to become a star. Almost 50 years later, Parton credited their meeting to something more than luck. “God has been good to me,” she said in 2014. “He gave me Carl Dean. And that was the perfect man that I needed.”
They renewed their vows for their 50th anniversary in 2016. Dean rarely spoke publicly about their marriage, but for the occasion offered his own assessment: “I wouldn't trade the last 50 years for nothing on this earth.”
Dean died in March 2025 at 82 after a long illness. Parton later said she had neglected her own health while “watching over Carl.” Shortly after his death, she released “If You Hadn't Been There,” thanking the husband who, as she put it, “made me dream more than I dared.”
Parton hardly sacrificed herself to marriage. She became rich, famous, independent, and unmistakably Dolly Parton. She just never seems to have thought that becoming herself required getting rid of Carl Dean.
Why I played ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’ at a funeral
The text from my friend contained one of the stranger questions I have ever received from a family planning a funeral: “Do you know ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’?”
I stared at my phone, a bit wild-eyed. My first instinct was to reply, “Why do you ask?” Instead, I simply wrote, “Yes.”
In that sanctuary, the music served something greater than itself.
His mother had died after a long battle with Parkinson’s. The song was one of her favorites, and the family had sung it with her for years. They hoped I could play it during a slideshow at her memorial service.
I have been a pianist longer than I have been a caregiver, which is saying something. Over the years, families have invited me to play at hundreds of funerals, and I never take that invitation lightly.
As a preacher’s kid, I began as cheap labor for my father’s church: Sunday services, weddings, funerals. I did it all. I no longer play weddings unless enormous amounts of money or extraordinary affection are involved. There is simply too much drama. Funerals are different. If possible, I still play them.
A grieving family does not need entertainment or musical pomp. They need someone willing to serve the moment. Music should give grief room to breathe while gently lifting people’s eyes, even if only an inch.
That assignment becomes considerably more demanding when the requested song is “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
I could have treated it as a novelty, played the familiar tune, collected a few smiles, and moved on. But this family was not asking for a joke. They were asking me to honor their mother.
A funeral is one of the few remaining places in American life where we must confront the difference between entertainment and reverence. Our culture can turn nearly anything into content, spectacle, or argument. A family’s grief deserves better.
My father had died not long before this service. He was a pastor who understood ceremony. He did not confuse reverence with stiffness or ceremony with showmanship. He knew some moments deserve the very best we can bring to them. His lessons sat close as I worked on the arrangement.
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Before moving to Montana, I lived and played in Nashville. Nashville taught me polish. Montana reminded me of intimacy. In a small rural sanctuary, every note sits close to the people who need it.
I did not try to make “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” sacred. The song was not sacred. The moment was.
A family’s love was sacred. A life well lived was sacred. So was the faith that endured years of Parkinson’s and the long goodbye that accompanied it.
I arranged the piece more slowly than usual, but not sorrowfully; tenderly, but not timidly. I added a few chords no one expects to hear in “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” My wife calls them my “non-sanctified chords.”
When I played it for her at home, she wiped her eyes. “You played it so respectfully,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
I called one of the daughters and asked for the exact length of the slideshow. Then I shaped the arrangement to fit it.
At the service, the pastor introduced the slideshow: “It is set to one of her favorite songs, ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,’ played by Peter Rosenberger.”
After decades at the piano, I had never received an introduction quite like that. Chuckles rolled through the sanctuary. I understood. Then the pictures began.
Childhood. Marriage. Ranch life. Children. Grandchildren.
As her life unfolded across the screen, the novelty disappeared. The room settled into stillness. A playful song associated with happy memories in her home began carrying the weight of a family’s love and loss.
I timed the final chord to the last photograph of her face. For a moment, no one moved. The chuckles had given way to misty eyes. That familiar little tune had slipped past everyone’s defenses and carried something deeper than anyone expected.
RELATED: Gratitude is not perspective. It is remembering mercy.
Christians do not pretend that Parkinson’s is beautiful or that death is merely another happy chapter. Scripture calls death the last enemy. But it also declares that Christ has defeated it. For those in Christ, suffering does not receive the final word. Neither does Parkinson’s. Neither does the grave.
The song was not the gospel, and I did not pretend it was. But it carried the memory of a woman who had sung it through years of suffering. In that sanctuary, the music served something greater than itself.
My father’s death still weighed heavily on me as I played. Perhaps that helped me understand the assignment. Even amid our own grief, we can offer the best of what we have to someone walking through theirs.
Sometimes grief calls for a great hymn. Sometimes it calls for silence. And every now and then, it calls for “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
Because for those who belong to Christ, everything really is … satisfactual.
Gratitude is not perspective. It is remembering mercy.
“I complained because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”
We have all heard that expression. I happen to live with someone who has no feet.
Yet during my decades of marriage to a bilateral amputee, there have been plenty of times when I complained that my feet hurt. I have limped around the house nursing a blister while living with a woman who leans her prosthetic legs next to the nightstand.
You would think that daily reminder supplied all the perspective I needed. It did. Perspective was never the problem. Gratitude was something else.
We live in a culture that has industrialized comparison. Social media serves it to us by the scroll: Someone has more than we do, and someone else has less. The algorithm knows how to make us envious, aggrieved, or smug. It cannot make us grateful.
Seeing someone with greater challenges can put our difficulties into perspective. It may even stop us from complaining out loud for a while. We say, “I don’t have anything to complain about.” But we usually do. We simply tamp it down for decorum’s sake before returning to our regularly scheduled grumbling.
Perspective may embarrass us into silence, but silence is not gratitude. Besides, what kind of gratitude requires another person’s misery? “I was feeling sorry for myself, but then I looked at your life and felt much better” probably will not land the way we intend.
Gratitude is not looking across the room and saying, “At least I’m not you.” It is looking at mercy and saying, “You saw me.”
I learned something about that during one of Gracie’s hospitalizations.
One afternoon, I drove home from the hospital for clothes and supplies before heading back. Some friends called and asked me to stop by their home. They ushered me into their kitchen, where a place had been set for one person.
There sat a bowl of homemade vegetable beef soup, a thick slab of cornbread, and a tall glass of sweet tea. As a Southerner, it was about as fine a meal as I could imagine.
My friends quietly said, “Your boys are safe with their grandparents for spring break. Gracie is safe at the hospital. And you are safe here. Sit down, eat, and rest. We’re watching over you.”
They saw what I had not yet recognized. I had spent so much of my life watching over someone else that I did not know how to admit I needed someone to watch over me.
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I have eaten costlier meals I can barely remember. Decades later, I still remember their kitchen, the table, the chair, and that meal with clarity.
What produced gratitude in that moment? Not perspective. I already had perspective by the truckload from countless hours in hospitals and surgical waiting rooms. What moved me was not that someone else had less. It was that my friends saw the burden in my stooped shoulders.
C. S. Lewis wrote of being “Surprised by Joy.” That afternoon, I was surprised by mercy. My friends prepared a place and came toward me before I asked.
That is a picture of the gospel.
God did not rescue us by pointing to someone whose sins were worse than ours. He saw us stooping beneath a burden we could neither understand nor remove. He did not wait for us to straighten ourselves, find the right words, or properly explain our condition. He saw us, and then He came toward us.
Paul writes, “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Luke tells of 10 lepers whom Jesus healed. All 10 received something beyond their reach, but only one returned to thank Him. Receiving something, even something miraculous, does not automatically produce gratitude. One man connected the mercy he received with the One who gave it.
Jesus asked, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine?” I find that question uncomfortable because I have spent a good bit of my life among the nine.
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I have too often received mercy and hurried on to the next problem. I have prayed for provision and complained about the packaging. I have asked God to open a door and grumbled because it squeaked.
My problem was not a lack of perspective. My problem is gospel amnesia.
“Bless the Lord, O my soul,” David wrote, “and forget not all his benefits” (Psalm 103:2). Gratitude requires remembering.
Self-centeredness says, “I deserve more.” Perspective says, “Someone else has less.” Gratitude says, “I have received mercy.”
My friends did not solve our crisis that afternoon. The hard road still waited outside their home, and it continues to this day. But for a little while, I rested while someone else stood guard.
I never knew grace could smell like vegetable beef soup and warm cornbread.
That afternoon, gratitude tearfully accepted a second bowl.
The loyalty gap that fueled Andrew Tate's rise among young men
Andrew Tate may say some “true” things — as BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey admits — but she warns that the manosphere he boasts is not the right path for young men to follow, calling it a “sinful reaction to feminism.”
And Nick Freitas couldn’t agree with Stuckey more.
“I think there’s two things that we have to recognize whenever we talk about what we might call the manosphere,” Freitas tells Stuckey on “Relatable.”
“Andrew Tate, Justin Waller, some of these other guys … the first thing we need to recognize is the reason why they resonated so much with young men was not simply because all these guys have admirable accomplishments in their own right, along with a lot of other problematic things,” he says.
“But they tend to be strong. They tend to be wealthy. And they tend to, you know, women tend to be attracted to them,” he continues, noting that a young man “without a spiritual basis” will be drawn to this image.
And those young men will also feel a sense of loyalty to men like Andrew Tate, as they feel like he was “sticking up for them when nobody else would.”
“Men associate loyalty with love,” Freitas says.
“And so a lot of young men look at guys like Andrew Tate and they say, ‘That guy had my back when none of you people in the church were mentioning any of this. And now the first time you want to come up and talk about the problems with masculinity, you want to bash Andrew Tate, the one guy that had my back,'” he explains.
“And so the way I think we need to approach something like that is certainly not by excusing what I believe is disastrous, sinful, and ultimately not genuinely masculine behavior,” he continues. “But I think we need to recognize the source of the problem and from whence it comes.”
Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?
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Falling Madly In Love With Someone On Social Media Is For Cowards
Fueled by the addictive power of social media, limerence — represents yet one more false god in the American quest for love and fulfillment.SPLC director allegedly used donor cash to fund secret romance with neo-Nazi informant: Indictment
Heidi Beirich was a director at the Southern Poverty Law Center. A man identified as "F-9" was allegedly a neo-Nazi informant. And according to a damning new report building off the Justice Department's latest indictment against the SPLC, the two allegedly fell in love under the most unlikely circumstances.
Indictments
In April, the Justice Department announced that a grand jury in Alabama returned an indictment charging the SPLC — a liberal outfit whose bread and butter is smearing law-abiding conservatives as "extremists" — with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.
'I knew it was that fat, ugly hog.'
The organization is accused of secretly dumping several million dollars in donated funds to individuals linked to various extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America — groups the SPLC was supposedly fighting against.
The DOJ expanded its case against the SPLC this month, filing a superseding indictment on June 2 that alleged, among other things, that the "SPLC secretly funneled approximately $4.1 million dollars in tax-exempt donor funds to a series of fictitious accounts" — such as for the fake Tech Writers group — that in turn paid so-called field sources "who were either leading or affiliated with multiple violent extremist organizations."
The field sources allegedly used SPLC donor money for various activities, including:
- Attending and hosting extremist group rallies across the country;
- Growing existing chapters of extremist groups;
- Creating new chapters of extremist groups;
- Making donations to extremist group leaders;
- Purchasing materials for cross burnings as well as for Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods;
- Creating racist paraphernalia that extremist groups sold at rallies; and
- Publishing extremist literature for recruitment purposes.
RELATED: Klansman allegedly on SPLC payroll was 'true believer' white supremacist, not reformed infiltrator
SPLC CEO Bryan Fair, whose smear- and fear-mongering racket has denied the allegations of wrongdoing, claimed that the field sources were "paid confidential informants" tasked with gathering "credible intelligence on extremely violent groups." He said the SPLC no longer works with such informants.
F-9 finds love
The superseding indictment alleges that in one case, at the SPLC's direction, a field source referred to only as "F-9" "infiltrated" a neo-Nazi group called the National Alliance.
While reportedly funded over a 20-year period, F-9 allegedly received over $1.2 million in SPLC donors' money just between 2010 and 2023. While receiving SPLC donor funds, F-9 allegedly fundraised for the National Alliance and helped it "carry out its extremist activities."
Although a proven asset to the neo-Nazi group, F-9 apparently gave the SPLC some return on their investment.
According to the allegations, in 2014, he broke into the National Alliance's headquarters in West Virginia; stole 25 boxes of documents; transported those documents across state lines; and, with the knowledge of an SPLC employee and the help of SPLC funding, copied those documents before breaking back into the National Alliance headquarters to return the originals.
The New York Post identified the SPLC employee involved in this alleged plot as the former director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, Heidi Beirich.
Beirich, an anti-Trump liberal who now serves as the chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, did not respond to Blaze News' request for comment.
The SPLC employee identified as Beirich allegedly used around $6,000 in donor money to pay a different field source — a man the Post identified as Randolph Dilloway, an accountant whom the neo-Nazi group hired to conduct a forensic audit — to falsely take the fall for the burglary.
The indictment alleged further that the stolen documents served as the basis for an SPLC "Hatewatch" story, which was used to solicit more donations.
Beirich penned the lengthy March 2015 "Hatewatch" article titled "Chaos at the Compound," where she discussed drama and mismanagement behind the scenes at the National Alliance, making extensive use of internal documents that she claimed Dilloway had copied and provided to the SPLC.
RELATED: SPLC indictment BOMBSHELL: Charlottesville violence allegedly was a leftist-funded 'false flag'
Beirich allegedly leaned on her field source for more than information.
Not only was the SPLC employee identified by the Post as Beirich overseeing payments of donor money to F-9, but she was also allegedly in a romantic relationship with him, according to the superseding indictment.
"During this relationship, Employee-2 and F-9 shared a house and two bank accounts," the indictment said. "Between 2015 and 2021, approximately $140,000.00 in donors' money flowed from the SPLC operating account, through the Tech Writers account, and was ultimately deposited into the joint bank accounts held by F-9 and Employee-2. This amounted to approximately 66% of all money ever deposited into their joint bank accounts."
The indictment further alleged that the employee identified as Beirich "then used donors' money to pay the couple's personal living expenses."
Property records reviewed by the New York Post revealed that during the period covered by the indictment, Beirich owned a vacation home in Ellijay, Georgia, in addition to her Montgomery, Alabama, residence.
After over 20 years with the SPLC, Beirich left the organization in December 2019 — around which time she was reportedly earning $190,000 in salary and benefits.
The SPLC and National Alliance did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
William White Williams, National Alliance's 78-year-old chairman, told the Post, "I knew it was that fat, ugly hog Heidi Beirich."
In addition to confirming that the details of the indictment comport with what happened to his organization and expressing uncertainty about the identity of F-9, Williams said, "I think some of those cluckers wanted to get out of the movement, and they went to the SPLC for help. But instead of helping them, [the SPLC] said, 'Why don't you stay in and get paid?'"
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Love will keep us together — if we listen to Jesus
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember Captain and Tennille — a married duo with a ridiculously catchy hit that topped the charts and won a Grammy. "Love Will Keep Us Together" made forever feel effortless. For the younger crowd, click the link for a glimpse of how music used to sound — and how optimism used to look.
They don’t make songs like that anymore.
There is a forever love — and it really does hold us together. And it’s summed up in three simple words.
And as it turns out, they don’t make love like that either. Love didn’t actually keep Captain and Tennille together. They divorced in 2014 after almost four decades, reminding us that the world’s idea of lasting love is fragile, conditional, and almost always temporary.
So ... happy Valentine’s?
Well, scripture offers something entirely different. There is a forever love — and it really does hold us together. And it’s summed up in three simple words:
Love one another.
That’s it. It sounds easy. But it isn’t — because we are saints who still sin. And when we turn inward, even subtly, we fail to love one another the way Christ commands. So let’s unpack what He actually meant.
Love your neighbor vs. love one another
So how does “love one another” differ from “love your neighbor”?
We tend to think of a neighbor as someone who lives nearby. But Jesus was asked that exact question and answered it with the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). From His explanation, we learn that a neighbor is anyone in need who crosses our path. Loving our neighbor, then, is about how we treat those who are not yet part of God’s family.
But “one another” means something more specific.
Throughout the New Testament, “one another” almost always refers to fellow believers — our brothers and sisters in Christ. Practically speaking, one another is your church family. Which is one of many reasons you need a church family.
What 'love one another' actually looks like
The New Testament gives us roughly 50 instructions for how we are to treat one another — commands that spell out what love looks like in real life. Someone helpfully compiled them all in one place, and it’s worth reading through carefully.
Not surprisingly, the most frequently repeated command in that list is this one: love one another.
And when we wonder how to do that — especially when some people are genuinely hard to love — the answer is found in the rest of the list. Things like:
- Serve one another
- Forgive one another
- Encourage one another
- Pray for one another
These aren’t abstract ideals. They’re concrete actions. And as we prayerfully consider them, the Holy Spirit may well bring specific people to mind.
Or consider this, from Romans 12:
“Let love be without hypocrisy — by abhorring what is evil, clinging to what is good, being devoted to one another in brotherly love, giving preference to one another in honor ... contributing to the needs of the saints, pursuing hospitality” (Romans 12:9-13).
That’s a lot of practical instruction packed into a few verses. And hospitality, in particular, is an area where most of us fall woefully short.
This kind of love doesn’t stay theoretical. It shows up in schedules, homes, meals, and patience.
Why Jesus called this command 'new'
In John 13:34, Jesus says something that can sound puzzling at first:
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.”
After all, the people of the Old Testament had always been called to love. The Law itself was built on loving God and loving others. So what was different?
“... even as I have loved you.”
That’s the new part.
Jesus didn’t just tell the disciples what to do — He showed them how to do it. For three years, He walked with them, served them, corrected them, bore with them, and loved them patiently.
And then — immediately after washing their feet, including Judas’ — He issued this new command, on the eve of His betrayal and death.
Love like I do.
The cost — and the witness
This is a staggering standard. And we can only love this way to the extent that we understand how deeply we ourselves are loved.
When we daily enter His presence, absorb His Word, and receive His love, something changes. Only then are we able to love one another in a way that looks unmistakably different to the world.
Which is exactly the point.
“By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
Before the world sees our love for our neighbors, it must see our love for one another.
The hard reality
Let’s be honest: Some believers are hard to love. Annoying. Irritating. The kind of people you quietly hope won’t sit next to you.
And sometimes, we are those people.
None of us are easy to love all the time. So we depend on the Holy Spirit to produce the fruit that makes us both more loving and more lovable. As Hannah Williamson has observed, the exercise of working out how to love one another is a “gritty training ground for loving the wider world.”
In other words, loving one another helps train us to love our neighbors. But first — the lost must witness our love for one another.
So in obedience to our Lord, let’s draw closer to Him so we can fulfill this beautiful task He’s given us — to love one another better.
A love that will, in fact, keep us all together.
Saint Valentine would be proud.
Don’t Wait Until Valentine’s Day To Romance Your Spouse
How best to celebrate Valentine’s Day as a married couple? Be considerate, be creative, and be grateful — on Feb. 14 and all year long.Today's top stories
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