'500 Days of Summer' & LOVE :-)

Ben Witherington III, a fantastic New Testament Pauline scholar just blogged on the new film '500 Days of Summer.' I haven't seen the film yet, but his review makes me really interested to:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/bibleandculture/2009/08/500-days-of-summer---and-then-some.html

I really liked what he had to say about love. It rings true with what I've come to believe, that love isn't a search for THE right one - but finding someone you'd be willing to give everything in your life for. Here's what he said. See what you think:

'I must come clean at this point and say, I am no fatalist or Calvinist. I don't believe I was destined from before the foundation of the world to marry some one particular other person. Indeed, I would say the nature of true and real love precludes such a notion. Real love is freely given and freely received, whether it is divine or much more mundane love. It can't be forced, manipulated, coerced, predetermined or otherwise destined.

What I do believe is in the providence of God and in God's leading. I do believe God can lead you into right possibilities, but what you do with them is another matter. Love is about wooing and winning, about allowing yourself to be led and persuaded. Its not about one person making another an offer they inherently can't refuse. And if it was like that, if it was like something as inevitable as gravity, it wouldn't be true love. It might be a strong attraction like gravity, but it wouldn't be love. Love is not like a magnet and iron filings, its a personal interchange between two personal beings in which both are treated as persons of sacred worth due respect, both are treated as free agents, both are treated as God's special creatures. And yes, both are treated as sexual persons, not sex objects. The objectifying of the other person is a sin, as it reduces the other person to a sum of their body parts. It also leads persons in a desperate quest for 'enhancements'. The coup de grace for me recently was hearing a father rationalize that the best high school graduation gift he could give his daughter was breast implants! Sure, if the goal is helping her attract all the wrong sort of guys. On this theory all a wonderful car really needs to better appeal is bigger headlights.*'

*A new ad campaign for a used car company in Northern Ireland just came out that uses this same comparison of choosing a woman based on her breasts like you would a car on it's headlights. I wanted to throw-up, just like this dad's comment makes me sick to my stomach.