“My dear children, let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love.
This is the only way we’ll know we’re living truly, living in God’s reality.”
1 John 3.18 (MSG)
So I tend to make the season of Lent a very private one. (Could you tell? #sarcasm #OMGshetalkstoomuch)
Not that I don’t talk or reflect or write about what I’m reading and learning and praying over. But that I tend to make the focus just Jesus and me. The necessity of Jesus’ life and death in contrast to my utter depravity and desperate need for rescue. Jesus’ holy perfection and my hearty disobedience. His eternal life, my ashes.
I don’t usually leave a whole lot of room in my head and my heart for much else to that story; it’s hard enough swallowing just how ridiculous the gap is between God and me.
But as introspective and inward-focusing as Lent can be, as it was designed to be, it’s only part of a much greater story.
When I intended to sit in silence this season, to step back from all the words I like to string together, to shut my mouth so God could speak, I don’t know what I was expecting really — probably not to hear from Him so clearly.
But how often God surprises me. Not by being full of truth and wisdom and eloquence and love and all of these things with the utmost tenderness. But that God would be all of these things to me. Specifically me. Who am I to not just witness but to experience His truth and wisdom and eloquence and love and quiet, powerful, moving tenderness, and in such a personal, real way?
I can believe and trust in God’s love for the world; God is love — so He loves. He so loves this world and I understand that because of everything I have seen Him do in and for it. It’s a corporate love for His creation, a cradling of the whole world in His hands.
But maybe if He’s asking me to stop seeing my sin as the general, generic sinfulness of mankind, then maybe He’s asking me to do the same for His love.
* * *
I love people. I love people’s stories, I love hearing about their lives, I love discovering what makes them tick. I’ve been getting in trouble since Kindergarten for socializing because you guys, I love people. (#ENFJ #letsbebestfriends)
But I know I don’t love every single person I come across. Sometimes there are people I don’t even really like. But more often and more tragically, there are people I don’t even really see. And that might be the saddest thing of all. As much as I think I love people, I do not live or operate or even subscribe to God’s reality.
Every single person is an eternal soul known and loved and forgiven by God. I can talk all day about how that’s true despite my own behavior dismissing that, and it won’t make it any more (or less) true.
But maybe if I practice love — real love, God’s love, His personal, intimate, interested, transforming love — His reality will be so much clearer in this dark and desperate world. His voice will be that much louder, much more prevalent than any other noise I make with all my other useless chatter.
That’s what Jesus did; He brought the kingdom of God that much closer to us, to where we were squandering and drowning in our own broken selves. He peeled back the veil and said, “Would you look at how My Father loves you? How He sees you?”
No. Not quite. Not fully.
But I want to, and I want to help you see, too.
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