A year ago I took a step back in response to a call from God to take a year to learn from him how to love in ways beyond what I had known up to that point.  I likened it to taking the fences off my playground.  The first weeks included an acute sense of vulnerability and yet also enticing challenge as God paraded before me familiar but now refreshed themes, people and circumstances. 

As I sit here today, poised to begin a solid review of this past year, Eugene Peterson’s words have been freshly recalled with agreement:  “love is who we are, love is what we want, love is what we want to practice, but it is in loving and being loved that we accumulate the most failures…We realize that we are hopelessly inadequate in love.”

He continues, “[Love] It begins as theological language.  It is a language used in a listening, attentive relationship with God in all the revealed operations of the Trinity and a way of being in a listening, attentive, affectionate relationship with another person just as she or he is before us.”

I don’t even know where to begin…I wrote in my journal this morning, “I still feel the losses I have suffered” which includes feeling the losses I have caused others to suffer.  I realize “how often we have missed the opportunity to learn and experience the deeper grace of redemption and reconciliation that is found only in shared humility and compassion and I wonder, is it even possible amongst people to share these things…or, do we, will we, continue to deceive ourselves in the ways of the world..thinking we are loving another even as we measure, judge, separate and avoid”, in accordance with standards we put in place not so that we can reach into another’s world but so that we can protect and feed our own world in the way we want it to be.

That is so much easier than coming together weeping, grieving, naming and repenting of what we do to each other.  We can pray all we want for loving relationships, but if we look for that only in our successes and the ease of being with another, we have not experienced love but only an engineered affirmation of our own way of looking at and being in the world. 

Love is only fully known and offered in the face of what is unworthy of such response.  It is in the moving toward, embracing, forgiving, restoring and staying with another in the midst of their failure and the shaking up of our self-crafted existences, that we experience and give witness to love, not as a benefactor to a beneficiary but as equal perpetrators.  Therein lies true humility and compassion. 

I have spent more than a year caught between two people like a deer caught in the headlights.  Everything I could have protested about, one or the other exposed also in me, leaving me without recourse and with nothing to do but repent before God…and so I grew increasingly silent while at the same time searching for opportunity to experience redemptive grace…hoping to be found an equal. 

I have no illusions…if anyone wants to build a case against me they will find no lack of evidence to draw from.  I am also painfully aware of how good I am at building a case against others and how difficult it is to let that ability die and be replaced by the blessing and welcoming of others, not just when they cross my path, but also when I  intentionally invite them into my space, regardless of the personal cost to me…trusting God to make it up to me, even as his word says he will. 

As human beings we have an addictive propensity to tear others down, to go after their failure, long before we will allow the discomfort or deep offense we experience with them reveal our own hearts and failures, challenge the ways we have structured our lives, and move us to humbly and compassionately appeal to God on their behalf, knowing they merely give us a visual of ourselves as we continue with them.

For me, this is bigger than just my own experience of relationships.  The very strength and truth of the gospel rests on this.  The whole point of being a Christ-follower is bound up in this.  It doesn’t matter what else we do…what ministry we have…what achievements we accomplish…what sacrifices we make.  Jesus said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  The only thing that will persuade the world that the gospel is THE GOOD NEWS is that Christ’s followers love one another.

This love is not the love the world has to offer – the one that measures another and decides if he or she has a place in our life, and on what terms.  This is to love up close, just as she or he is before us, at the other’s feet perpetually, open to what God has for us through that person that we could never have anticipated.  I sit wondering today if it is even possible to be in relationship according to these parameters.  I think it is.  But is it probable?  I don’t know. 

The possibility is rooted in God’s love shed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.  The probability is rooted in our will to truly and completely abandon ourselves to that love especially in the presence of another who seems so adept at times at wounding us and/or revealing the intricate ways we construct our lives to protect ourselves which inevitably leads to our own wounding  of others.  It is no small thing to learn to celebrate and embrace another in the midst of such realities. Sigh…

I don’t know what else to say.