Steve West: Learning to love

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, October 4th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Steve West now on how he learned to love others in a more godly way.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: In 1976, I was sitting in my dormitory room reading a 1971 book by Walter Trobisch titled Love Is a Feeling to Be Learned. My roommate Rick and I lived in an antiquated building, the oldest dormitory on campus. A clanging announced the onset of radiator heat; a Southern Railways train periodically roared noisily through campus a block away, rattling our single window; and noise from the even less studious echoed off the uncarpeted hallways.

But I kept reading. Trobisch’s prose and his candor was riveting.

His point was not novel yet was paradigm-changing for me: Love is not primarily feeling but action, verb and not noun. Trobisch meant that feelings are learned by self-sacrificial action. Scripture gets at it when it observes that God “set His love” on Israel (Deut. 7:7). God sets His love on us. When we set our love on someone, we choose, irrespective of feeling, to commit ourselves to relationship with them, to do the work of love.

But I didn’t know that then. Until then, I thought of love as something you fell into and out of. Trobisch changed that.

That morning Rick was eating cold pizza for a late breakfast, fuel for tackling introductory calculus problems. He teetered back in his chair, sipping hot tea. I didn’t think Rick had a girlfriend or dates, but I didn't ask him.

Reading any book by Trobisch is a warming experience. A pastor and counselor, you feel him across the table, having a conversation with only you. He reaches out of the pages of his book and across the decades - to the perplexed, despondent, and lovelorn.

In the front of the book, Trobisch encourages readers who feel the need to find a counselor to see at regular intervals.” Then there’s this amazing invitation: “However, in case you find no one, you may write to me and I shall try to help you by correspondence.” He signed his name, followed by his personal address. I would write to him if I could, if nothing more than to thank him.

Who today would carry on such correspondence? Who today would make such an unselfish offer? Along with his wife Ingrid, the couple were inundated by thousands of letters once his books were published. They answered each one.

“Happiness is only a part of love - this is what has to be learned,” wrote Trobisch. “Suffering belongs to love also. This is the mystery of love, its beauty and burden.” Reading that, I put the book down on my desk and looked out my dormitory window. In the park across the street, couples sat and talked, leaning in toward one another.

Rick left for the cocoon of his design studio, my questions about love hanging in the air.

I don’t know what happened to Rick. I moved out after that year and lost track of him. I don’t know if he married or remained alone. I don't know what he learned or failed to learn about love in the decades that followed. The next year I met my wife. I set my love on her. And that’s where it remains.

I’m Steve West.

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