Love Laid Down

1 John 3:16: By this we know love, that He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers."

When confronting this verse my immediate thought is: "what does it mean to lay my life down?"  While this may seem an obvious answer, I am not so sure.  Perhaps it is because I only think of laying down in reference to sleep or, in the ultimate, to that final sleep of death.  So when John, empowered and influenced by the Holy Spirit, says that we should lay down our lives it must encompass a certain sobriety.

I think of a toothpaste container being emptied.  As the paste is expelled from the tube it shrinks.  The tube is squeezed and pressed and rolled up to siphon every last bit of toothpaste from the container.  When I think of laying down my life for the people I love, this is what I think of: I am the tube, my love the paste.

However, the irony of this whole ordeal is that for every bit of love that is squeezed out of me, God refills my stores with a grander, greater, truer love.  It turns out that for me to be filled with greater love, I need to rid myself of all the love I have.  Additionally, as a balloon swells to ever increasing sizes, God continually enlarges our capacity for love and to love.  This is the utter beauty of Christianity and one of its unique features among the so-called world religions.  Praise God for its truth!