(Follow up to poem "Created To Love")God is Love...so if we were created in His image than we are also love...designed to love.
What I have found in myself is that I have had an overwhelming desire to love people but when you love that can be considered a weakness by the world because you open yourself up to be hurt. No one wants to be hurt so to save face people try to minimize the importance of love as if it is optional. In the kingdom of God love is NOT optional in fact it is said that (1 Corinthians 13:13 13) "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."
So why do we seem to shut down when it comes to loving our neighbor? A significant other? Ourselves? I would usually go into a long-winded explanation but I think this will remain short and sweet...but maybe not! (lol) I believe that people in the church have allowed the world to set the example of love (extremely CONDITIONAL love). For example, look at the movies we watch can you count how many people die in the actions films we see today? Try one action sequence at least? It's too many to count. Our video games are full of violence and death now. We see divorce everyday on court shows, celebs can never stay together. We see single parent families on a daily basis, etc. Our society is teaching us that love is conditional at best... no guarantees. Society tells us to stop hoping for love, stop loving those that don't love us and SELF PROTECT! The world is about"Looking out for #1"...God is NOT in the equation so why are WE (God's people) following suit?
We may not like what comes with the territory of being open to love, the vulnerability, the inconsistency, the frustration but it is who we are! If living in this country as a black person is difficult...you can't change that...so why do we try and change our loving nature? I refuse to apologize for desiring to love a wonderful man of God...God put that desire there! I refuse to NOT encourage my sister in Christ because the world says that she is my "competition"! I refuse to continue to condemn myself for my imperfections as if I have not been created by the most perfect being in existence, God! I REFUSE!
We must demand and command love again in our lives or we will die spiritually and physically. Quick story, I saw a show on TV about sick children with brain tumors. These children were on the verge of death when they were "adopted" by college athletic teams who would invite them to games and call them when they were in the hospital, send them letters, etc. These teams loved on these sick children. One of the parents of the children said that she took her daughter to the doctor for a checkup and the doctor said that her T-cells were at a more normal rate (she was healing faster than normal) the doctor was curious to how this could happen at such an accelerated rate. The doctor knew the medicine could not work this quickly or well. The mother could only think of the weekend before when her husband and child were hanging out with the rugby team this past weekend and the weekends before! So it looks like love can heal...so how can we just choose to NOT help heal people?
The U.S. has the highest rate of Depression in the world (according to a Forbes article in 2007). I'm pretty sure much has not change since then...probably just worse. We work diligently and constantly toward the "American Dream" in this country but what we don't realize is that we suffer spiritually along the way. We must understand that Depression is a symptom of a Love Deficiency...it IS curable. We in the church need to fully understand what is important, how can we chase our dreams and not spend the time to encourage others and give to them freely or are we just too busy to love?
(Stay tuned for the followup..."Too Busy To Love")
2 comments:
I could not agree with you more. It is difficult to love when you don't have a source to fill up your emptiness. God is the source of love and so when we go to Him, we then are filled up to give to others. Yet, in this world we have such an unnatural drive to be independent, in the sense that we want what we want, we want to do it on our own, or honestly, sometimes we can't get past our own pain. God can heal that when all we need to do is reach out and receive God's love, he showed us how through Jesus...so we may love. We are as you say, created to do so.
Keep it coming, I'm looking forward to a book!!
I do agree that we are here to love. However, most of us are missing God in our lives. This means it stops us from trusting that the people you love won't hurt you. We need to allow God in our lives and then go from there and everything will fall in place, How many of us really go around loving like Jesus did? Honestly? The true reason is that we are missing God. I don't believe it's because we are afraid that someone will hurt us, we just can't admit that we don't trust in GOD like we really should, therefore, we will get hurt due to lack of faith.
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