Love in its realest form

This goes out to all the big-hearted people out there. To the men and women of the world that understand love in all its veracity. A love that causes you to spend your time and money to go and encourage someone in prison. A love that will have you fasting and wearing your knees out praying for someone to get well or a job. A love that will have you sharing a good meal with the under-privileged. A love that will have you calling someone to "check" on them or say I love you meaning it.

A love beyond measure, a love whose quintessence I cannot capture in words. That is the greatest love of all. A love that does not just issue from the lips, but is lived with action. A love with which you will lay down your life for your friends physically or other. This is the type of love for which Jesus was nailed on the cross. It is the kind of love that drove Mother Teresa into abandoning the relative comforts of the convent to be among the dirty, hungry and homeless people she called the “poorest of the poor” on the stinky streets of Calcutta.

My friend Naomi has a big heart

We are talking about a love above self. The Luthers (both the reformist and the civil rights leader) were driven by this love too. It is this love that got Abraham Lincoln to oppose slavery and deliver the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 emphasizing that all men are created equal and therefore there was "no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another."

Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and the 13-year-old girl Aisha Nabukeera who died rescuing her friends from a dormitory fire all embody this love. In a world driven by capitalism and materialism, this love has no doubt waned but can never be extinguished where people are. My friend Naomi demonstrated this recently when she mobilised friends to contributed Shs5,000 each to help homeboy Johnson who needed Shs64m for a cancer operation in India. By the time of writing this, more than Shs1.5m had already been collected.

This surely is love in its purest form; a modern-day example of loving thy neighbour as thyself (the second greatest commandment). So let us love one another unreservedly. It really is all we and the world needs – real love. Nothing less, nothing more. Again, here is to all the true lovers in the house!