The Art of Loving

Not that long ago, I was listening to a missionary speak about her job. And it wasn’t ‘to convert people’. It was to love them. And in that, people see the love of Jesus. Because as people, we don’t have the capacity to love that much on our own. How could we? So often the love we have is conditional. Though we don’t always want it to be that way, as humans that’s our nature.

You know, sometimes I look at someone and I don’t want to love them, because maybe they’ve hurt me or maybe they’ve let me down or maybe I just don’t feel like loving them because I’m upset or in a bad mood. But then it’s like God just gives me this love and suddenly I want to love them regardless of the injustice. And sometimes it’s like ‘are you kidding me I don’t want to love someone I want someone to love me’ and I have this compassion and it’s like ‘no no I don’t want to be compassionate toward this person’. But there you go. This is why God is God and I am not. That, and a million other reasons.

I was thinking about the most impactful moments in my life, and I see that they all come down to the act of being loved or loving another. When people do things for you, not because they want something from you, but because they love you and they want to show you that. They have so much love within them they can’t keep it inside. And isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it beautiful being loved like that? I saw the cover of a book, and though I haven’t read it nor know anything about it, I loved the title; “Loved Back to Life”. Love livens. Love fills. Love, in a way that’s totally not cheesy, is really all you need. If I were to spend the rest of my life simply pursuing God and trying to fathom the way He loves me and loving other people, I feel like that would be everything anyone needed.

One of my favourite memories is a warm, gentle memory of me listening to a song. “Furious”, by Jeremy Riddle.

This is the chorus:

His love is deep, His love is wide
And it covers us
His love is fierce, His love is strong
It is furious
His love is sweet, His love is wild
And it’s waking hearts to life

And what happened in the memory, in that moment, was the first time I understood the lyrics. Or, began to understand the lyrics. (For I will spend my lifetime trying to understand His love, but I will never fully completely know until Heaven.) And I heard those words and they hit me deep in the heart and I suddenly didn’t want anything else in my entire life except for more of His love. How glorious!

“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” (1 John 3:1)

And so we are.

Sarah xx