Run toward these people, not away. There is a quiet confidence in knowing we all hit a couple of wrong notes here and there. The report card on our faith is how we treat one another when we do.
He knows our sadness and the brokenness we want to hide from Him, and He sends people to look for us.
You see, they wanted to follow Jesus’ example; instead of telling people what Jesus meant, they just loved people the way He did.
Jesus told the people He was with that it’s not enough to just look like you love God. He said we’d know the extent of our love for God by how well we loved people.
Following Jesus is about having your paradigms shift as you navigate a wide range of emotions while living the big life Jesus invites us into.
God’s idea isn’t that we would just give and receive love but that we could actually become love. People who are becoming love see the beauty in others even when their off-putting behavior makes for a pretty weird mask.
Instead, Jesus modeled that we don’t need to talk about everything we’ve done. It’s like He was saying, what if we were just to do awesome, incredible stuff together while we’re here on earth and the fact that only He knew would be enough?
I wondered if maybe all Christians operated this way. I didn’t think so, because most of them I had met up until that time were kind of wimpy and seemed to have more opinions about what or who they were against than who they were for.
Keep this in mind, though: loving people the way Jesus did is always great theology.
Following Jesus means climbing, tripping, dusting ourselves off, and climbing some more. Faith isn’t a business trip walked on a sidewalk; it’s an adventure worked out on a steep and sometimes difficult trail.
He continues to rewrite our lives the way I rewrote my book- in beautiful and unexpected way, knowing the next version of us will usually be better than the previous one.
I want to be doing things today, not just flipping through crinkled and yellowed mental pictures of what happened a long time ago.
God doesn’t give us a recipe for living as a community, but He gives us great ingredients: He gives us everybody, always. If we’re going to get it right, it’s going to take everybody to pull it off. It won’t get done in a day or two either. It’s going to take always.
We won’t convince people with our arguments or Bible verses; we’ll move them with the kind of sacrificial love that precludes every other explanation.
Like my friend, they do this because they have developed completely unrealistic ideas about what their faith can do in the world when it’s expressed in love. They decided to spend more time loving people than trying to game the system by just agreeing with Jesus. You see, they wanted to follow Jesus’ example; instead of telling people what Jesus meant, they just loved people the way He did.
Telling people what they should want turns us into a bunch of sheriffs. People who are becoming love lose the badge and give away grace instead. Tell the people you meet who they’re becoming, and trust that God will help people to find their way toward beautiful things in their lives without you.
Yet, the incredible message Love came to earth to give was that we’re all tied for first in God’s mind. While we’re still trying to get our arms around this idea, God doesn’t want us to just study Him like He’s an academic project. He wants us to become love.
I spend a great deal of time working for kids in Uganda and India and chasing bad guys who hurt them. I started a nonprofit a number of years ago and now Sweet Maria and I think about my day job as a great way to fund the things we’re doing. Now when I put on a suit and tie or jump on a plane to go take a deposition, we call it “fund-raising.” It still makes me grin every time to say it this way. It’s like a really successful bake sale to get rid of bad guys.
He continues to tell us through our successes and our mistakes who we are, and here’s what He wants us to know – we are His.
What Jesus said we could do is leave typical behind. We could leave all of the comparisons and all of the trappings and all of the pretending of religion. Jesus told the people He was with that it’s not enough to just look like you love God. He said we’d know the extent of our love for God by how well we loved people.