As PP climbed the podium and the media team displayed this beautiful banner with the word MONA LISA in colourful designs, on that cold Sunday morning, I did a mental run through my mind to see if I had missed anything. The theme for the month was LOVE CODE. PP promised to share the 411…

As PP climbed the podium and the media team displayed this beautiful banner with the word MONA LISA in colourful designs, on that cold Sunday morning, I did a mental run through my mind to see if I had missed anything. The theme for the month was LOVE CODE. PP promised to share the 411 on love and that was what I came for. What was the relationship between love and the Mona Lisa painting?

Then PP, dressed in his impeccable suit and tie, took up the mic, led prayers, and opened with the question: “Who painted the Mona Lisa?”

“Leonardo da Vinci,” half of the congregation replied almost immediately and PP nodded.

Then PP asked again. “If I gave you two Mona Lisa paintings and asked you to differentiate between the fake and the original, can you?

Now I was getting impatient in my seat, at the far end of the cinema hall. This wasn’t what I signed up for. Is he going to talk about love or what? I came with high hopes … I will be really vexed if today’s talk didn’t touch on love. I have been waiting for February to come because of these LOVE CODE series!

Still, I answered with the crowd: “No.”

I couldn’t tell the original Mona Lisa painting from a fake. Prior to five seconds ago, I didn’t even know it was Leonardo da Vinci who painted the Mona Lisa. In my head, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso … they were all the same!

“But do you think Leonardo will know?” I catch myself in time to hear PP ask, and the crowd scoff their yeses in response.

I roll my eyes. Of course Leonardo da Vinci will know! What kind of painter will he be if he can’t tell his work apart?

“The same way you trust Leonardo da Vinci to differentiate between the original Mona Lisa and a fake because he’s the creator, is the same way you should trust God to differentiate between true love and a fake, because he’s the creator …”

And it hit me so hard, like someone had just slapped me with a hand fan – if Mona Lisa had a creator, love had a creator too. And if there is anyone with a manual on how to get it in love and ships, it had to be the creator – God.

_______

There is a story someone once told about a man who bought a novel invention. The ad had talked about how this invention could perform 95% of human work – including bathe for us, brush our teeth, iron our clothes, wake us up in the morning and ensure we didn’t go late to work – this man didn’t even mind emptying his life savings to purchase this invention. But after he unboxed it, he discovered that the mind-blowing tool came in pieces and he had to couple everything together. But that wasn’t the problem. His problem was that the manufacturers had forgotten to place an instruction guide in the packaging. This invention was useless to him because there was no guide on how to make it work!

As PP went on with his teaching, and even after the service, I kept thinking of this story and the Mona Lisa analogy. Outside the church, nobody else emphasized the place of God in love. We go about love like we invented it or like our fore-father’s invented it. We act like we have it all figured out until we are served breakfast and burned badly.

If only we will look at the inventor (God) and His instruction guide (The Bible), we would be saved from a lot of trauma and unnecessary heartbreak. We won’t have to filter through a million and one persons, searching for the person who won’t scar us for life.

Snippets from my notes from some of the things PP said

1. You cannot afford to be indifferent about love because you cannot master anything that you have not deliberately learnt.
2. We focus on God’s view on marriage because marriage was primarily instituted by God.
3. If you want to understand the subject of marriage and what it entails, you must look at God and His word.
4. The word of God doesn’t tell us to marry the person we love but to love the person we marry.
5. God’s word is the standard. God doesn’t want any of us living in isolation. He was the one who pointed out the flaws in human compatibility that man shouldn’t be alone.
6. Love is all about sacrifice.