What does it look like to love? That is one of the three things we will be focusing on during this next season of ministry along with ‘building inroads to our community’ and ‘giving the ministry away to the people’.
I don’t know how that question hits you, but I know how it hits me. One one level the question seems so great, so important, and so exciting. On another level the question seems like it might be fluffy cotton candy that is simply sweet but has very little substance. On a third level the question seems like a mystery that will probably never get solved so why waste the time and effort trying to answer it. On a fourth level the question seems totally terrifying!!!! This thing called love is obviously core to the human soul, it is something that we ache for yet it seems to allude us. We understand that we were probably made to love others and to be loved by others. We have a faint understanding that people are important and that love is the life giving ‘gel’ that makes things in life work. We like to think we are really good at loving…..and then we run into someone who is really hard to love or we find ourselves in the midst of a situation where loving is beyond our imagination. So we find ourselves unable to fulfill what we know we were made for. Not only can’t we love like we wish but we are not even sue we know what love actually is. We have figured out how to survive (or try to survive) in the day in and day out network of relationships but none of them are perfect no matter how hard we try. It is so disappointing and disillusioning.
So what do we do? A quick answer in this blog will not suffice so we will spend an extended amount of time in the next year or more trying to take an honest look at what love is, where it comes from, how we learn to do it, what it looks like in any given situation. It will be a long obedience in the direction of life and learning. See you on the journey.