I'm sorry to hear about the loss of your wife and while I might could agree that love is not strictly an emotion but rather a complex set of emotions, attitudes and behaviors, etc. That in no way implies that love is some sort of material substance like gold or stone or paper or hydrogen or electrons (i.e. the material created universe of stuff).I am going to stay away from the word ontological because I think it is misleading. I prefer to use the word “thing” just now because I have limited understanding.
I had occasion to study the subject of love while working through the stages of grief when my wife died last year. I was surprised to learn that love is not an emotion. I had always assumed it was, or, something like an emotion.
But while emotions come and go and are dependent on our immediate circumstances, love doesn’t act that way. Emotions are not actors, but reactors. They respond to stimuli and can change at a moment’s notice. Love does not behave in this way.
1 Cor 13 tells us that love (and faith and hope) abides. This means it, a thing, takes up residence. It also tells us that love is kind and minds not the things of itself; in other words, it is purposeful. It rejoices. It can be provoked, but not easily. It bears, believes, hopes, and endures. Consider the love that shows up for a mother when a baby is born. Unless one of them kills that love, it endures; it abides. It takes up residence with them.
None of this is surprising given that God is love. Does He spill a thing called love out of heaven upon us, fit for special purposes, as gifts?
I found that the answer to conquering my grief was to admit that, just as love had come and abided for 41 years, it had gone because the reason for it to abide ceased to exist. What was left were emotions without the object of affection. That object was not my wife, as precious as she was, it was the beauty of God-given love that was entrusted to us for that duration and had returned to its source.
So I will respectfully disagree with you that love, faith and hope exist only as concepts in a thinking mind. I am convinced they are more than that. How much more, I am not sure.
The bible states flatly that God is Love. We cannot know what that means in any precise way before seeing Him face to face but whatever extent it can be said that God is a real thing we can except that Love also is a real thing. But that is as far as we can go. You can be individually convinced on this or that but there is no authority from a doctrinal perspective in your personal experiences. The heart is desperately wicked and we ought not trust it to convince us on doctrinal matters. That's what the scripture and sound reason are for.
In any case, whether Love is a thing or not has no bearing whatever on the idea that time is a thing. Time is not a thing, it IS an idea. It is nothing other than a concept that we use to communicate information about the duration and sequence of events relative to other events. It is not a substance that we travel through. There is no past or future except in our minds. Everything that exists does so right now and anything that ever leaves the present moment no longer exists. No one, including God Himself, can go to the future or the past because those places do not exist.
Clete