Love's Pattern

A trip to Utah, a strange similar forest of aspens, and a reminder that love can be learned, repeated, and lived.  No excuses - follow the formula.

This year, we are learning to love better by exploring the greatest commandment – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  We’ve searched our hearts and plumbed the depths of our soul for how to love the Lord better, and halfway through the year it is time to investigate our minds.  How do we love God with all our mind?  What does that even mean?  This week is the sixth in a ten-part series on learning to love better with our minds… and today, I want you to meet Pando, the Trembling Giant of Utah, and the world’s largest living organism.

"Remember, you are loved, so go, love better!"

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Transcript

            Near the western edge of the Colorado Plateau, in the heart of Central Utah, lies Fishlake National Forest.  A hidden in plain sight gem, Fishlake National forest is visited by a tranquil smattering of  tourists from Utah and neighboring states, but aside from those outdoor enthusiasts with a bucket list to visit all the national parks and forests, Fishlake is a more subdued destination compared to some of Utah’s more famous national parks like Zion, Bryce Canyon, or Arches.  And for the locals, that’s just exactly the way they hope it remains.

            Aside from the obvious attraction of Fish Lake itself, the national park offers miles of hiking trails, ATV off-roading sites, boating opportunities, vibrant high mountain meadows coated with wildflowers, bird watching, elk, deer, and even the occasional moose… but the most famous resident of Fishlake National Forest is also the oldest resident.  If you ever are traveling through Utah, and have a few minutes, may I recommend you bring your camera and enjoy the fall colors with Pando, the Trembling Giant.

I’m Scott Beyer and this is the Love Better podcast where we explore the truths and lies about love and more importantly how to turn love into a skill – something we can get better at and hone along the way. 

This year, we are learning to love better by exploring the greatest commandment – Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  We’ve searched our hearts and plumbed the depths of our soul for how to love the Lord better, and halfway through the year it is time to investigate our minds.  How do we love God with all our mind?  What does that even mean?  This week is the sixth in a ten-part series on learning to love better with our minds… and today, I want you to meet Pando, the Trembling Giant of Utah, and the world’s largest living organism.

If it weren’t for the signage, you would easily mistake Pando for another beautiful section of Utah forest.  Hiking through the national forest, you eventually approach a beautiful grove of quaking aspens.  Quaking aspens get their name from the way their leaves trembling in the wind – hence, Pando’s nickname, the Trembling Giant, the leaves shimmer against the backdrop of the blue sky and reflect the light as it hits the quavering leaves.  Quaking aspens, with their characteristic smooth trunks and pale white bark reach high all around for acres, creating a forest of white sentinels to walk amongst.  The older aspens reach almost 80 feet in the air, while young saplings shoot up all around the forest floor, just beginning their journey toward the sky above.  However, this particular aspen grove holds a secret - unbeknownst to the casual eye, this aspen grove is not many aspen trees… it is one aspen – Pando.

Pando is a what is called a clonal aspen grove.  Every aspen tree as far as the eye can see – all 108 acres of it, are in actuality, the same aspen all interconnected by a massive root system. Each tree, young and old alike, are genetically identical.  Over 40,000 stems that appear as individual trees, all connected, all copies of the same original.  They are Pando, the Trembling Giant, the world’s largest organism.  Over 6,000 metric tons of interwoven and networked stems that rise to the surface as trees.  Each tree seemingly individual, but in truth, exactly the same as all the others.

In Western culture, we have a fixation with the individuality of love.  We view every relationship, every connection, every person as an individual and we focus upon all the elements that make those things unique.  There is some truth to this approach – every person and every relationship is unique in a certain sense – your love for your spouse is different than your love for your children or your parents… and it is certainly different than how you love your neighbor or your enemy.  Like fingerprints, we emphasize our love for each individual as being one of a kind… but this Western approach misses a Pando truth.  Though all relationships are different, they are also meant to have the same root.  Biblical love is like Pando, a thousand quaking aspens that seem unique, but in actuality, all follow the same pattern.

How we love others is meant to be repeatable.  It may remove some of the sense of spontaneity, but love for others is, and can be, formulaic.  God has given us the recipe.  The short version of that recipe is the second greatest commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself”.  The longer versions of the recipe can be found in more situational specific commands like, “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.” or “Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them.” Both found in Colossians 3 or “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” found in Matthew 5.  These concepts regarding love – that we find throughout the Scripture are true for all people at all times because love is like the Pando tree – though each stem looks a little different – some old and scarred across the bark, and others new, green, and fresh – they are all essentially the same.

The Pando tree gets its name from the Latin word for ‘spread’ or ‘extend’.  What started as a single aspen many, many years ago has spread to become thousands of trees filling acres of land.  I like to think of love the same way.  Love is meant to be something that can spread from one person to many.  In fact, love is so formulaic, so repeatable, so completely 100% NOT unique that all love can be traced back to a single individual.

In the apostle John’s first letter, he simply says, “We love because He first loved us.” All love begins with going back to the pattern for love, and that pattern is God.  Again, it is the apostle John that tells us, “So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

God is proof that love is a pattern – we see that God loves ALL people at ALL times.  He loves us while we are His enemies according to Romans 5:8 because while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.  Or most famously, John 3:16 “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

God loves all people with a type of love that is consistent.  His love is unbending, unaltered, and unwavering in all circumstances… and then what does God tell us to do?  Love others that same way.  In John’s first letter, that pattern of love is emphasized when John writes,

“We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” (1 John 4:19-21)

In our modern world, we use phrases like “falling in love”.  We compare love to an accident – like tripping over a curb or finding a twenty-dollar bill blowing across the street in the wind.  And there are more phrases like this that ascribe a sense of luck or chance to love – we talk about love at first sight, or when they met there were “sparks” – as if the only way to find love is for it to find you, like a wildfire or a serendipitous encounter. When we think of love as being spontaneous and unique – we lose the power that comes with knowing that love is a pattern… and if there is no pattern, then there is also no control.

I think that the sense of love being a happenstance connection of luck that is different every time has shackled us and left us feeling powerless in relationships.  When love is something that happens to you, you are left a victim when others are unkind to you, your marriage seems to be drifting apart, or your relationship with friends or relatives is feeling distant.  Our modern view that emphasizes the uniqueness of each relationship removes our sense of autonomy and takes away our incentive to work on loving others.  It isn’t your fault that the relationship is dying – after all, it was just a cosmic accident that the connection was there in the first place.  Accidental love can be fallen out of just as fast as it can be fallen into.

Imagine living in a world where we fully embraced love as a pattern.  Pando love – every relationship attempting to clone the love of Jesus.  When marriages were failing, couples wouldn’t talk about drifting apart, they would talk about what steps they needed to take to get the skills needed to succeed in love.  We wouldn’t worry about how we felt about our children, we would focus on whether we were following the pattern of loving parenting.  We would stop blaming others for how we felt about them and start taking control and ownership of every relationship.  Pando love, believes there is a pattern to love, and you start asking about your part in the equation instead of everyone else’s.

Serendipitous love gives too much power to the emotional connection of the moment and disconnects us from the root system that God gives us to endure, persevere, and love even when our enemies provoke us, our relationships are rocky, or our hearts are tired.  Biblical love, allows us to do as Ephesians 3 says, “be rooted and grounded in love”.  Love isn’t something that happens to us, love becomes foundational and concrete.  Something you can count on instead of something you need always fear might slip away when the stars no longer align.

Pando with his great acreage of interconnected roots and towering aspens reminds me of Jesus’ imagery of the vine and the branches.  In the gospel of John, chapter 15, Jesus says, “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. (Jhn 15:4-6 ESV)

Individual branches of a grapevine are useless without the root, the central vine that is the source of all their energy, vitality, and growth.  A branch separated from the vine dies.    Abide in Jesus and bear fruit, outside of Him you bear nothing.

And to prove how important that is to love, do you know what Jesus says next after telling His disciples to abide in Him?

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. (Jhn 15:9-12 ESV)

Jesus isn’t just the pattern for love, He’s the source of love.  And do you notice in John 15 how uncomplicated love is described?  Jesus loves like His Father and we are supposed to love like Him.  How do we do that?  Simple – “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in His love”

Love is found in adherence to a series of commands.  Jesus followed His Father’s commands and that made Him loving.  We follow Jesus’ commands and we will be loving, too.  The goal is to submit to Jesus the King because He is more than just Savior – He is the master of love and the source of it, too.  His rules ARE the rules of love.  You don’t have to feel it, to do it.  Just follow the pattern.

I like to think of God’s people as the true Pando of this world.  We may seem like individual trees each standing tall on our own, but when you get closer you find that we are all just the same tree connected at the root to the One who is the source of all love.

And if the tree imagery doesn’t quite work for you – how about the other visual Jesus uses – light.  Christians are called the “light of the world”, but in the end, we must also remember what John said – Jesus is the “true light, which gives light to everyone” (John 1:9).  You and I, we are supposed to be lights, and at first those lights may seem like individual pinpricks of light shining in the darkness – each unique and different, but the closer people get they should see the truth – we are all just mirrors attempting to reflect the true  light – the brilliant beautiful light of Jesus.  Love isn’t meant to be a cosmic accident or a surprise – love is a pattern as old as God.  After all, God is love.

            Let’s learn to love better.  Learn to follow Jesus’ commands and abide in His love because His love is a pattern worth following.

As always, thank you for listening and hopefully we've done something to help make your life a little bit better.  If you have a chance to rate, review or share the podcast it would be a blessing.  By sharing with others or leaving a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, you help us reach more people. 

Or maybe you have a fun history fact, a feel good news story, or a riveting scientific fact you think could help us love better, I’d love to hear it!  Feel free to email me at scott@biblegrad.com 

And if you are ever in the Louisville, KY area, I’d like to invite you to worship with us at the Eastland congregation.  We meet for worship every Sunday and have Bible classes for all ages Wednesday’s, too.  If you want more information about Eastland, visit us at eastlandchristians.org.  Or if you are looking for more tools to enrich your Bible study, visit my personal Bible site, Biblegrad.com, where you can sign up for daily Bible devotionals called Biblebites and receive them in your email each morning, take online Bible classes, or find videos that will help you study through the Bible throughout the year. 

And until next time, “Remember, you are loved, so go… love better.”