Love like that.

Hello, friends.

I hope this rainy Thursday finds you warm and filled with the Holy's Spirit's peace. Not unusually, I have some thoughts to share with you today :) But I would love to take a moment this afternoon to say thank you. Thank you for reading. I love hearing your thoughts and responses, and have grown in my love for Jesus through these measly attempts to write. Praying that God would bless you richly and abundantly as you seek after the heart of God.

I've been thinking so much lately about about being judgmental. Our sinful nature is so prone to point out other's wrongs and develop opinions about another's life.

We've gotten really good at tossing around labels and engaging in finger pointing.

We make organized little files in our heads full index cards where we place tiny snapshots of all the people in our lives and the world as a whole; and one by one, the souls are filed away. They are filed away, and suddenly the need to see people as humans created by God, the need to relate, the need to understand, to love, to encourage- is gone.

We know the principles of Scripture. We know the vast list of right and wrong. And most of the friends that I've discussed this with? We genuinely, collectively, passionately love Jesus. With our whole hearts.

Yet we go back to those files where everybody fits so perfectly inside a little box... and we forget how to LOVE.

How to really, really LOVE.

We dig our heels deep into the soil of what is familiar and easy, then we structure our hearts around it. We build trenches to keep people out, and create a fenced garden allowing no unfamiliar thing to enter. So we miss out on fertilizers and garden tenders.

We turn our noses up at those who differ. We like to be the only holders of truth and let others know that doing things a different way is unacceptable.

We like to say what we don't like.

We don't like that parenting technique.
We don't like to be uncomfortable.
We don't like a politician's foreign policy.
We don't like a professor's lecture style.
We don't like when someone disagrees with us.
We don't like being cut off on the freeway.
We don't like particular worship styles.
we don't like that tattoo, that piercing, that shoe choice.
We don't like that he drinks, that she bought a lottery ticket.
We don't like when something is done differently than we're used to.
We don't like being questioned.

We are steeped in self-righteousness and the memorable shade of our own surroundings. Our hands have a tight grip on the glue jar and we're pasting, pasting, pasting ourselves to those we see who are familiar. We form herds and swim about in schools of identical fish.

This is just ridiculous. It is. We're all guilty of it to some extent, but it's ridiculous. I am feeling humanity's ridiculousness today.

I feel the sad grief of my own skin and the eyes that I look through and how these eyes have denied the beauty in the bodies surrounding me. The eyes that have seen only the things I am comfortable with, and not the needs of my brothers and sisters. They eyes that seek to determine who people are, and who people are not.

SO, today, I'd like to speak the opposite. Practice the opposite.

I want you to know that you are loved. God has breathed life into you, and called you worthy of love. God made man and called His creation GOOD. That doesn't mean you won't encounter deep suffering, and fail a hundred and one ways before next Thursday. That doesn't mean your heart won't seek to lead you astray. Your heart and mine.

But we are all here; We are all perfectly molded and crafted by the God of the Universe.

I'm going to say the most redundant thing anyone has said lately, simply because I feel so led to say it.

Jesus loves you. He loves the world. That's why He came to die for our sins. Once and for all, He paid the price. Because He LOVES us.

He told us and showed us in the most miraculous way just how radical His love was. And is. And will always be.

"If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.

We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love."


Let's love like that.


Thankful for you, friends. I love you.

~Lyss