Sometimes the simplest truths are the hardest to learn.  They do not land in us as a new skill acquired but by the reorienting of heart, mind, and soul…often it seems, with only great labour and at irrevocable cost. 

To try and recount the paths I have walked in these last few weeks on the matter of love would be too much…too many different circumstances and threads of thought and voices God has used, even the silent ones.   And He is far from done.  However, I think I finally believe and embrace, using the adapted words of Eugene Peterson from his book Practice Resurrection (I cannot remember his exact wording), that only those who have come to the place of realizing they cannot love, have a chance at offering love to others.

My own words come back to haunt me…ministry is the overflow of Christ in you.  I write this, I teach it, I say it to others.  Only now am I really beginning to grasp what I have to this point seen as through a dirty window, though it has been right in front of me, and on my tongue.  The only real ministry is Christ’s love poured out through me in the overflow. 

As I think about loving generously, I realize that such loving is not about abundance for others but submission to others.  It is not about all that I have to give, but what do people need and what can they receive.  It calls for me to bring an attentive love to them – a love that is more about knowing than being known; a love that is about discerning who they really are, how they have been shaped and formed by God through design and life experiences and receiving such as my invitation to learn to love in new ways.  It is about confronting the illusions I create in place of the real person, so often done so that they fit my life script neatly instead of letting their presence challenge that script and perhaps even force me to rewrite it.

I read John the apostle’s words the other day, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

For me, that means laying down the narrative of my life that explains all that has shaped me, that I have carefully crafted in order to make sense of who I am and what I have experienced, especially in times of wounding (by me or against me), and making room for God to tell his story through me.  I have to let go of that default story that I fall back on everytime I feel a need to protect myself, justify myself, explain myself, uphold my dignity.  Too often it gets in the way of seeing things differently, trying life differently, engaging in relationship with healthy boundaries that are designed, not to keep me safe, but to free me to generously welcome and nurture others. 

Such laying down requires trusting in the generous love of God in Christ, that He will meet my need, soothe my pain, make up for my losses, and give me reason to celebrate – all of which will inevitably come as I live out His love for the other’s sake and not my own.