MOULTRIE — While on a mission trip to Gulfport, Miss., recently, I found myself wondering why I had gone out there and spent the week helping people I had never met. It never kept me awake at night pondering that thought, but it kept hitting me hard as to what possessed me to go.

Was it just a good opportunity to write a story from another part of the country? Was it just a chance for me to use up some of the vacation time I had to use up before the end of the year? Or did I go out there for something much deeper than human rationale and understanding?

Then it hit me: This was all about doing acts of love for other people and being faithful to a call God has for my life. Think about it: Why else would so many people do things that make absolutely no sense and/or cause people to make total fools of themselves? The answer is simple: It is all about love.

That led me to even more questioning: What exactly is love? There are several ways to answer that, but that led me to figure out something true love is not.

Love is not forcing another to person to do something they do not want to do. The common way to see this is found when people say “If you love me, you’ll do this.” The only person being loved in that way is yourself, and using guilt to force someone into doing what you want is being only in love with yourself.

Back to the question of what is love. I’ve found that love and sacrifice are virtually synonymous. The most obvious example of sacrificial love is Jesus Christ dying on the cross as the atonement for mankind’s sin, thus providing the only way into eternal life.

That kind of sacrificial love doesn’t have to go to that kind of extreme, but there are several ways people can show love through sacrificing something. Whether it be time, money or any other resource, anybody can show love to another person just by giving a little of themselves.

Love can also be a deep desire but more than an emotion to just do something for another person. During the Christmas season, that often translates into wanting to give someone a gift without expecting anything in return.

Maybe combining those two trains of thought together could give the best definition of love. How better to show someone you love them than by being willing to give up anything and everything of yourself and expecting nothing from them in return?

The mission trip to Gulfport really brought that meaning of love home to me. The group and I spent time giving of ourselves doing various jobs for the people we met in Mississippi, and we did it without expecting a single thing in return from them. We did get their gratitude, of course, but just to show them they were loved by people hundreds of miles away was a great definition of what love is and can be in our lives.

(John Oxford is a staff writer for the Moultrie Observer.)