Love

Love--such a little word with so many nuances!  Love is used to describe how we feel about pizza, a movie, our God, and our family.  I want to change how I  love this year.  With one year to live, I don't want to misuse that word and I want to make sure that I love as how God wants me to love. I don't want to be flip in how I use the word, .  I don't want to say I love pizza or a movie or any thing.  I like those things, but they are not something I am willing to lay down my life for.   This word should be reserved for only the dearest and most important people in my life, but it goes much deeper than that.

The greatest commandment in the Bible is "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind."  I can feel pretty smug about this verse until I look at the rest of the story (verse).  "And the second is like it:  "Love your neighbor as yourself.  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."  I do love God, Jesus and the Spirit, and each day I hope to love and grow in that Love, but it is the second part of this verse that gets me.  I fall short of loving my neighbor.  I ask, "Who is my neighbor?"  Well, it's anyone that God has allowed my path to cross.  This is where I fall so short.

I have unconditional love for my immediate family.  They are not perfect, and sometimes we hurt each other, but at the bottom, I would give my life for them.  I choose to overlook when they hurt me because I hope they do the same for me.  I want to extend to them the grace that has been given me by the blood of Jesus, but there are others in my extended family that are not as easy to love.  You know the ones.  They don't fit the peg I try to place them in.  They don't do what I want them to do, or they don't act like I think they should, or even worse, they do very unloveable things.  I can then extend this out to ones I attend church with, that I work with, and the list goes on and on.

In I John 4:20-21 states that if I say I love God, yet do not love my brother, then I am liar.  For if I cannot love my brother whom I have seen, how can I love God whom I have not seen.  Whoever loves God must love his brother.  This is the challenge. 

This year I am committed to loving the unloveable in my life.  I do not have to like what they do, how they are, and I certainly do not have to hang out with them, but I am called to love them.  For some people this may be easy, but for me it may mean forgiving them for hurting me, it may mean looking at them and accepting who they are--a person made in the image of God.  I know that the devil will do his best to defeat me in this area because one of his biggest weapons is creating division.  He loves it when we do not love.  Creating hate and dissension is what he is all about. 

The greatest gift of Love was given to us by God:  His only begotten Son, who laid down his life for all of humanity.  His love is perfect.  This is what I want to remain focused on.

With one year to live, I do not want to stand before God and answer for not loving the way I should.  I know that this will not be easy.  I am human, afterall, but I am going to try and look at each one in my life as a soul that needs to know Jesus, and when I am feeling those feelings of anger, dislike and distrust, I am going to stop right there and pray for God to help me defeat the evil one, and to help me love this person because it will only be through HIM that I will accomplish this. 

Love,