A young boy sits next to his little sister in their bedroom. As she is hiding her face in his arms, he asks himself, what is love? He thought parents were supposed to love each other.

A teenage girl is lying on the bathroom floor. Through the tears she can barely see the razor, let alone the marks on her leg. She shouts to the empty air, what is love? She felt as if she had nobody to show her.

A woman is picking out another long-sleeved shirt to wear at work in July. She does it to hide the bruises that she has to face every day, bringing her to ask, what is love? She is beginning to believe that this is it.

It’s a question that seems to be as old as existence itself. What is love?

Many people spend their entire lives searching for it, turning up hardened hearts and crushed spirits. We expel all of our energy running towards material things such as money, clothes, or cars, hoping to find love in that. Matthew 6:19-21 advises us not to build up material things while we’re living on earth. They are merely temporary. Money runs out, clothes tear, and cars deteriorate. We also run to societal standards like status, beauty, or jobs. We think that maybe, just maybe, I’ll love myself and receive love when I’m this and I have that. Just as verse 21 says, we can’t take those things to Heaven with us. It’s not true love after all, and it shouldn’t be our priority.

Others beg for God to show them. When we fall upon the feet of Jesus, we see that He is love. It’s easy to become used to hearing about what Jesus did, especially during the Easter, as silly as that sounds. But it happens, and when you truly think about it–about the beating, mocking, loneliness, all of it–you see His love and His sacrifice. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, so that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Humans are the closest thing you can get to true love. We can love deeply and hard. Oh, how imperfect we are, though. Each one of us sins, makes mistakes, is selfish, the list goes on and on. However, we can look to Jesus, the end-all-be-all epitome of love, and make it a daily endeavor to be like Him.

At the end of the day, this age old question isn’t hard to find after all. All we must do is look to Him for a true love that will persevere. When you are down and out or simply need to be reminded, repeat these three sentences to yourself: Jesus is love. Jesus sacrificed His life for me. Therefore, love equals sacrifice.