Active Love

I believe in “active love”. Not many people have heard this term, but it has great meaning. I personally learned the term from my senior year English teacher. You cannot really define this term simply or find it in a dictionary. The only real way to understand it is to give an example of what “active love” is.

The easiest way to describe active love is doing something more. My senior year, two friends, Craig and Germaine, and myself decided to do something more. Every year my high school holds a food drive for the local food pantry that happens to be down the street. Student Council collects cans for a week or two, and some teachers volunteer to drive the food to the local pantry. The students were only involved in putting goods in bins; some of them did not even know where the food pantry was. We decided to change that.

We wanted to create a line of students from the high school all the way to the food pantry and pass the food down the line. This helped students get actively involved in their donating, and helped raise awareness for the simple brick building. It was cold and snowy the day the event took place and many students realized that they were lucky to have a home to go to at night, and really began to think about those who did not. What was surprising was that people from the community came out to help, people driving past pulled over and found a place in the line, those in their houses came outside to take part. This event did more than donate food it, helped raise awareness and gave those involved the feeling that they were taking part in something bigger than themselves.

If we had just continued to put food in bins and have others drive it down the street, we were not becoming informed or raising awareness. By doing more, and getting actively involved we were able to tell the community that we cared about those who are hungry, and inform people of where and what our food pantry is.

Active love is doing more. It is not just donating money or food and leaving the rest to others. It is taking part and going one-step farther to change something. I believe that with active love we can change the world.