The Ohio river is the third largest river in the contiguous United States. Starting in Western Pennsylvania, it makes it winding journey of 981 miles until it joins the Mississippi River, adding it’s roiling masses of water to the Mississippi, making it the largest river in the US. Along it’s meandering journey, the Ohio picks up water from a vast array of tributaries and watersheds. The total volume of water flowing through the Ohio is about 125,000 cubic feet per second. To give you some context, that’s enough water to fill the Empire State building with water in under five minutes. It is enough water to fill 78 shipping containers every second. It’s enough water to fill 300 swimming pools a minute. It’s… a lot of water. The Ohio is part of the cardiovascular system of the United States carrying water, goods, and people across this great land of the free and home of the brave… and for early settlers, the Ohio was a source of life and a source of disease. You died of dysentery makes for a funny Oregon Trail meme, but dysentery, cholera, typhoid, e-coli, and even tapeworms claimed numerous lives along the Ohio River. Bacterial, viral, and parasitic infections were just facts of life for untold generations. All that changed though, when Charles Hermany arrived from Cincinnati.
I’m Scott Beyer and this is the Love Better podcast where we explore the truths and lies about love and more importantly how to turn love into a skill – something we can get better at and hone along the way.
The widest point of the Ohio River is about one mile wide, and it is just north of my hometown of Louisville, KY. Louisville was settled as a city in large part due to the Ohio River. The ability to transport goods and have access to water for crop irrigation made it an ideal location for early settlers. Eventually, Louisville began to grow and the need for regular utilities, such as water, became important enough to found the Louisville Water Works in 1860. The Water Works, now renamed, the Louisville Water Company, started out with 512 customers, but today services over 800,000 households… and that is in large part due to their Chief Engineer, Charles Hermany.
Charles Hermany arrived from Cincinnati and declared that transporting water wasn’t enough. The Louisville Water Works ought to be cleaning the water, not just moving it. Filtration should be the goal. Clean, filtered water is the difference between life and death. Treated water is safer and tastes better. As Chief Engineer, Charles believed that people should be able to have access to water that they could trust wouldn’t hurt them later. They should be able to drink without reservation or risk of infection.
Clean water… how hard could it be. The answer – it was thirty years of hard. They had to build a reservoir to hold the water and let the mud settle. He had to hire a team to experiment with filtration systems to figure out what would work consistently and economically. Then those experiments had to turn into a treatment plant with layers of sand and gravel to filter the water, and then that filtered water had to be pumped into towers and across hundreds of miles of pipe that had to be designed to keep filtered water from becoming contaminated along the way. What we take for granted: clean, safe, potable water available on tap was anything but easy. What Marcus Agrippa did for the waterways and viaducts of Rome – Charles Hermany did for Louisville. He made it safe and he made it accessible.
There is a connection here to love. Love is a lot like water. Everyone needs it. Numerous studies have been done on the need for affection and love that every human requires from infancy onward. A life without love leads to trauma, dysfunction, and a plethora of psychological disorders. Love is the building block for family and community. It irrigates our hearts, revitalizes our purpose, and a drought of love will lead people to do irrational things. As the apostle Paul says,
“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have [the gift of] prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:1-3)
Yet, love, just like water, isn’t always accessible for people and it isn’t always safe. The wrong types of love… like “love of the world”, “love of pleasure”, or “the love of money” are all very dangerous things – even the love of laziness is clearly warned against. The Scripture consistently warns against loving the wrong kinds of things.
The Bible also teaches that there are types of relationships that are impure ones – relationships where love gets twisted. The love of the adulteress in Proverbs 2, the love and enticement of sinners in Proverbs 1 and 1 Corinthians 15:33, or people who only love you for your money or influence.
Proverbs 19:6-7 says, “Many will seek the favor of a generous man, And every man is a friend to him who gives gifts. All the brothers of a poor man hate him; How much more do his friends abandon him! He pursues [them with] words, [but] they are gone.”
Just like everyone needs water… everyone needs love, but sometimes love gets contaminated by sin and bias. The world is rampant with examples of dysfunctional, unclean love – dysfunctional love between parents and children where selfishness or trauma distort the relationship. Spousal love violated by a marriage vow being broken. Even Jesus faces the impact of contaminated love when Judas betrayed Him for the love of money.
In a world where people love themselves first, love money and stuff more than people, choose pride and boasting and are willing to say abusive things, in a world where parents don’t model good behavior and children don’t listen, where so many people are ungrateful, unconcerned with holiness and being loving, where we aren’t willing to reconcile after a dispute, but gossip and slander instead, in a society where we struggle with self-control at best, but don’t even try to have it at worst, and we live in a culture that glorifies brutality and violence, where we don’t love what is good, where we are willing to betray trust, live recklessly, and are conceited, loving pleasure more than God… it can often feel like you are surrounded by poisoned love. Everyone knows the word ‘love’, but no one has ever seen the real thing.
And if that scenario feels all too real – I want you to recognize that everything I just said came directly from Paul’s second letter to Timothy in chapter 3:1-4. There is nothing new under the sun. We’ve always struggled with poisonous love. Love that comes with hooks and barbs because it is tainted with bacteria, viruses, and parasites.
So, let’s recognize a couple of things – this is what love looks like for most of us, but it also isn’t what love ought to look like. Love, like water, should be pure. Charles Hermany was right. Water should be clean and pure for everyone.
And Jesus feels that way about love. If everyone listened to Jesus, we would do what He said in John 15:12, “This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.”
Love would be sincere, pure, unadulterated by bias, pride, or selfishness. Love would be accessible and consistent across all ages, races, genders, and eras. It isn’t right that there are children without parents, people without friends, marriages that are broken and hearts that have learned not to trust. That’s wrong. Love shouldn’t have barbs and it shouldn’t be for only a few. Real love should be something everyone feels and has access to. Anything less is appalling.
So, here’s the goal – be pure and be accessible. One very simple method for learning to love better is to stop asking “Who should I love?” or allowing yourself the false privilege of deciding when love is appropriate. Love is always appropriate. We don’t withhold love from people any more than we would withhold water from them.
And we also don’t put qualifiers on it. The most often quoted verse of the Bible is John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son…”
Not everyone takes advantage of God’s love, but everyone has access to it. God considered His love a basic human right. Better love seeks to provide better access to it. Which is hard because just like pure water, pure love is hard to make. It took Charles Hermany thirty years to figure out and build the infrastructure to offer clean water from the Ohio River.
If you are going to love others well, you are going to have to do the same. Pure love takes a purification process. Peter said it well in his first letter to Christians when he said:
“Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.” (1 Peter 1:22-23)
We cannot sincerely love others until we begin to purify our own souls. Get rid of the bias and pride and bacterial baggage. Remove the parasites of the wrong love – love of things, pleasure, and self above others. If you don’t work through your own junk and clean out both sinful behavior and your own tainted reactions to twisted love you won’t be able to offer clean love to others. And there is a humorous example of that in Charles Hermany’s quest for clean water, too.
When Charles Hermany final did filter the Ohio River clean – so clean that you could see right through it. A glass of pure, crisp, cool H2O available to all Water Works customers… he all of a sudden had a new problem. People didn’t know what to do with such clean water.
Farmers reported that their horses were unwilling to drink it – it was so clean the livestock didn’t know what it was. Other customers complained that it didn’t “smell like water” – whatever that means. In short, people weren’t used to good water… and that’s true of love, too.
It is likely that your own ideas of love are confused because you have had poor examples of it. You may be uncomfortable loving without false motives or receiving love without an agenda. And if that is true of you, it is going to be true of others, too. Pure love isn’t normal. Being kind without asking for something, lending without expecting in return, patience and forgiveness without bitterness, clear boundaries, without secret rules or passive aggressive manipulation… loads of people have never experienced that. In fact, a lot of times when people first receive love, it comes with boundaries or ethics that they aren’t used to and their first cry is, “that’s not loving.” Oftentimes, Christians are accused of not being loving because, to a world that doesn’t know pure love, Jesus’ love doesn’t look like any type of love they’ve ever seen.
But if you are a Christian – you do know what love looks like. It looks like the cross… and your job is to look more and more like the Man on that cross in how you treat people because that’s the command that we “love one another as He has loved us.” And the great thing is even if your love isn’t as pure as Jesus’… it will still be a whole lot more pure than what the average person experiences in this broken world.
And as alarming, confounding, and strange as pure water might be to those who haven’t experienced it before… once you get a taste of it, it is really tough to go back. Pure water makes you realize how tainted the false stuff is.
Which is probably what Jesus was getting at when He said that love was evangelistic because Jesus told His followers that “By this all men will know you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” Real love is a lot like clean water – it is refreshing enough to make you crave the source.
Eventually the horses got used to the water and the citizens did, too. And now, a hundred years later, Louisville refuses to accept anything but the best because they are still ranked as the best water in all of America. Charles Hermany knew what he was doing – people love the pure stuff.
So there’s the two goals. Number one make love more accessible by offering it to everyone and withholding it from no one – even your enemies. And number two, purify your own soul so you can love from a pure heart. Work through your junk, examine your motives, and learn how twisted love in your life may have unknowingly twisted you, too.
Learn to love better – learn to offer clean love.
Everyone needs it – even if they think it doesn’t smell like love they’re used to.
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And until next time, “Remember, you are loved, so go… love better.”
