SPIRITUAL MUSINGS: Love One Another
Note: The lovely lady who wrote this article for one of Broadway’s publications is no longer living, but her words are very much alive with her spirit.
What is God doing in our midst right now?
God is calling us to LOVE. A simple answer that is not easily lived.
God is calling us to Think Bigger, to Act Bolder, to Believe Stronger, to Love Boundlessly.
God wants us to Expand, to Open, to Grow, to Risk, to be Vulnerable, to Practice Her message of Love from a Higher, Wider, more encompassing perspective.
God is calling each of us to Be the person we were born to be. To Be the teachings his son, Jesus Christ, taught us. To Be more than we thought we ever could be. To love in ways that we thought were impossible.
God is calling me and you to Be the process of loving, even when we don’t want to, don’t know how, even if we don’t like the person, even if it makes us angry, or scared, or feel helpless.
There is only One Message from God. “Love One Another As I Have Loved You.” It may take us a lifetime to be living that, and that is our only purpose for living.
Every problem in the world would be solved, if Love were the basis for solving it. Every wound of every victim would be healed, if Love were the healing balm that was applied. Every war would be avoided, if Love were the basis for the negotiations. Every relationship would be healed, if Love guided each person and their communication.
How would Love behave in this situation? How would Love dissolve this conflict, this problem, this estrangement, this fight, this distrust, this judgment, this pain, this wound, this hurt, this feeling, this emptiness, this loneliness, this abandonment, this ego, this victimization, this desperation? What would Love do? Love would dissolve the pain, wounds, hurts, emptiness, loneliness, abandonment, victimization and desperation that my ego is afraid to let go of and replace all those feelings with only Love. Love can love me into wholeness. Then I will know how to love another.
God never said it would be easy. In fact, it will be the hardest thing we ever do. And it will be the most powerful. It will set us free. The Message is a simple one. “Love One Another As I Have Loved You.” And Jesus taught us how.
God, Give Me the courage to take one simple step and then another and then another until I am responding more and more from my Love center, until each time I can Love as You have always Loved me.
Jana R.
posted by Broadway Church @ 6:38 AM
1 Comments:
This isn't a direct response to the post by Jana. However, it is something that I put in my personal blog a while back. I entitled it "Wheat and Weeds". I wonder what anyone else thinks about it:
A friend of mine wrote me to tell me about a sermon she had heard yesterday at an African-American Bible study:
. . . the passage we talked about was the one about the wheat growing with the weeds, and not throwing out the weeds because we might uproot the wheat in the process. We talked about weeds and wheat learning from each other, and how we don't know which are weeds and which are wheat. I have never subscribed that only "believers" are saved. I think that God has enough to do to figure out which is which, and I am not spending my time worrying about who is "worthy". I am glad to be around people from whom I can learn, and about people who might learn from me.
I responded:
Fabulous analogy and metaphor. And I totally agree.
I don’t generally subscribe to “new age” type philosophy/theology, however, I am beginning to come to the philosophy that we are all one. It’s a great hurdle because there are so many people with whom I do not want to be one. It’s a hard philosophy to understand and probably with my merely mortal mind, I probably can’t.
Perhaps the appeal of fundamentalist evangelical idealogy is its lack of complexity. It makes everything so simple. Yes, God is love--for everybody that agrees with me or for everybody that I like. But this seems to limit God to the mere mortal. While I cannot fathom being one with Lee Harvey Oswald or Charles Manson in my or their current state of my or their spiritual journeys, God can. (Sorry, I didn’t mean to go ethereal, esoteric, way-out-philosophical on you.) Believing that God is love for everybody is much more difficult; it is much messier for us mere mortals.
Personally, if I had to live in a world made up only of James Dobsons, Jerry Fallwells, and James Kennedys, I think I would prefer to be in hell as depicted in the book of Revelation. Let me be heretical here: I, though Southern Baptist most of my life, am starting to disbelieve in hell. It is difficult for me. My human heart of hearts wants to see Hitler burn in hell. But my simple heart of hearts, the one that came to know and love Jesus when I was a tiny child, knows that God is not like that.
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