Before You Read — A Word About How This Is Written

I owe you an honest word before we begin, about the voice you are going to hear.

Of all the people who wrote the Scriptures, John is the one who wrote about love the best. He does not argue. He does not build a case. He simply tells you what he saw — the Word became flesh, and we saw His glory — and then he leans in close, the way an old man does when what he has to say matters more than how it sounds, and he says it again and again. Beloved, let us love one another. He circles the same few enormous things — light, love, life, knowing, abiding — and never wears them out, because they cannot be worn out.

I have tried, in the pages that follow, to write the way John writes. I want to be plain with you: I cannot. I am nowhere near him, and I know it. But I would rather reach for the right thing and fall short of it than write you a careful, clever pamphlet that explains love and never once carries it. So if at times this sounds like a man straining toward a voice not his own — it is. I am borrowing what I can from a better writer because the subject deserves better than I am.

And I have to tell you the truth about what a book can and cannot do, or I would be lying to you on the first page. This book cannot teach you to love. No book can. Love is not information. You cannot read your way into it. The only One who can teach you love is God Himself, by His own love poured into you from the inside, by His Spirit. All I can do — all any book can do — is point. I am like a man standing by a road, pointing and saying look, there He is, that's Him. The looking is yours. The teaching is His. If anything in these pages does any good, it will not be because I wrote it well. It will be because the One who is love was already at work in you, and these words happened to be standing nearby when He did His work.

One more thing, and then we'll begin. I am not a man to whom love came easily. Some people are born warm; you've met them, and you've wondered how they do it. I am not one of them. I have had to go after kindness, and fall short of it, and go after it again, and God is plainly not finished with me yet. So I am not writing to you from above. I am writing from the same road you are on. If that is where you are — still learning, still falling short, still wanting it — then come. We'll walk it together.

I will tell you at the very end how this book actually came to be — because it turned out to be the proof of the one thing these pages most want you to believe. But that word keeps until you have read the rest.

— Michael Winslow