“Lord, help with the love that hurts, for that is the love that saves!”
There are two kinds of love that bear the same name and resemble each other in nothing else. One seeks to rest, the other seeks to be crucified. One wants to receive, the other wants only to give, even when it has nothing left to give except its own pain. This world knows well the first one. It sings of it in all its songs, paints it as sweet and easy, promises it without a cross. But that love does not save anyone, because it costs nothing. And what costs nothing cannot redeem anything.
The love that saves is the other one. It is the love that hurts, because to truly love means to carry the other within yourself — with everything heavy in them, with their weaknesses, with their occasional malice, with their silences that wound you. Christ showed it to us on the Cross, not in words: “Greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). He did not only say it — He did it. His love for us was not a warm feeling, but a wound received willingly, a death accepted for another’s life. This is what any true love looks like, at its end: a small cross, carried in silence, for the one you love.
Saint Paul describes this love gently, but we forget how harsh its rule truly is: “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). It does not say that love avoids suffering. It says that it endures it. The one who truly loves his spouse, his child, his parent, his friend, does not love only the joys they bring, but also carries their wounds, their weaknesses, and sometimes even their ingratitude. And in this carrying lies salvation, because there — in the pain received for another — our mind steps out of itself and draws near to the image of Christ.
Saint Isaac the Syrian said that the merciful heart is the one that “burns with love for all creation,” and that this burning cannot exist without pain, for the one who loves feels in his own body the suffering of all. It is not a love that avoids wounds — it is a love that receives another’s wound as its own. This is how Christ loved: “He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). Saving love does not avoid the other’s pain — it takes it upon itself.
That is why this thought is a well-aimed prayer: “Lord, help with the love that hurts.” Because our fallen nature flees from any pain, even from the pain allowed for another’s salvation. We want to love easily, without a cross, without night, without patience. And that is why we need God’s help precisely here — not to escape the pain of love, but to have the strength to carry it to the end, without running away, without closing our heart, without turning it into bitterness or judgment.
Whoever has ever truly loved a person hard to love — a sick one, an enemy, a prodigal son, a darkened soul — knows that there, in that pain received and carried further without extinguishing, something is worked that cannot be worked otherwise: the likeness to Christ. Not the love that feels good, but the love that endures what is bad and remains — that is the love that builds the soul. That is the love that saves, because it takes a person out of himself and leads him, through the wound, to the Crucified One.
May our love be like this: not one that avoids thorns, but one that receives them, so that it may blossom, in its time, into the most beautiful flower — the resurrection of the one for whom we have endured.
