What is love? It is difficult for most people to define love very well other than it is a feeling that they experience. Someone has said that love is a verb. That is what Beno Fischer found out many years ago.

Beno Fischer is a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. During that terrible ordeal, Beno encountered a man who begged him to "trade my cold soup for his cube of bread." He really did not want to do it because he himself was very hungry. But it was apparent that this other man was near death. Even though the cold soup would have satisfied Beno's hunger more than the dry bread, he made the trade anyway. "Each day I set the tasteless broth by his bedside and slowly bit off pieces of the bland crust of bread."

When the camp was finally liberated, the captives were taken to a hospital and given physical examinations. Beno says, "The doctor told me I lived for only one reason: out of love for my fellow prisoner, I traded my soup for the bread! The bread had enough nutrition in it to keep me alive. The soup had no source of nourishment." (Source: Robert Schuller, It's Possible (Old Tappan, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Company), p. 99. )

Perhaps then, the best definition of love is in learning how to forget and abandon ourselves and to serve others. At least that is what we find in Jesus Christ.