This American Life

How to Love EVERYONE

Hello.

You may have heard that God wants to you love Him and not the world. But I sincerely believe that God is infusing people to passionately love the world. It seems daunting at first the sheer magnitude of what God is doing. How to we begin to love billions of people? The truth is we have already begun.

There is no greater joy for me than to love Gemie, care for her, and give her kind words. I feel elated when she smiles during her foot massages. She loves to see me satisfied after one of her awesome meals. God gives us our own experiences of love as glimpses into a life fully lived for the world. This life is a movement toward being like the perfect life that Jesus lived. As I begin to stretch myself to love my family, my friends, and my culture, God is expanding my capacity to love. I see what God has reserved in my heart. He unlocks more as I surrender to the expansion. What results is a large and vast capacity in me to experience love and a more meaningful existence here. Imagine how magnificent a life lived outside yourself can be.

How to start loving everyone:

• Start with the people you know - Jesus explains in Matthew 6 that we should start with out families and friends. Take care of unresolved issues. Treat your parents to dinner. Give a helping hand tutoring your peers. Take your wife on a date. Do the things you do best for the people you know most.
• Walk outside - Get to know your neighbors. Look for ways to lend a hand. Pick up trash. Mow someone's lawn. Start a football game and ask your neighbor to join.
• Give things away - Take your favorite item of clothing, game, food, object, book, painting, song, electronic device, and give it away to a friend or someone who would use it or enjoy it.
• Continue with people you hardly know - Treat the janitor to lunch. Volunteer at a school/church. Buy someone a weeks worth of groceries. Make someone dinner. Do the things you do best for the people you encounter everyday.
• Plant a seed and feed it - Find one thing you can do on a consistent basis. Pick up trash at the beach. Pay for gas. Knit mittens for kids who are cold.

You are probably doing some of these things already. Notice that your goal is not to be the world's next great humanitarian. Treat someone nice and keep going. And remember to humbly give credit to Jesus, the God who makes this love possible.

The Inner City Woman:

An Example of Love

I heard a story last night about a woman who moved into a poor, high crime, urban neighborhood. She described how God had given her family a house previously owned by drug dealers. Their mission was to exist there in the shadows of the city (the part where God seems to have abandoned humanity). She makes an effort to walk down the street, every evening, with her husband and three young children in tow. Over time the neighborhood children start to play at the house and she welcomes them with open arms. A local church starts providing hand-knit mittens during the cold months for the children. She planted a seed of love in a place full of darkness and hate.

As I sat listening to this story I thought about my place here. I was challenged to reexamine my own calling. My effort to lead a small group of children in Little Saigon have been challenging lately. For the past few months all I could feel was friction and despair. The job here was getting increasingly difficult and I saw little impact in the kids, their families, or the culture at large. But I sense now that the real miracles are just beginning. Perhaps God is finally ready to torch something to get my attention.

You can listen to the story above yourself at Mars Hill, entitled The Most Normal Thing Imaginable

The Mystery of Hypocracy

via ThinkChristian as a comment to GospelDrivenLife. Read up kids. It's good for you.

Why is it so hard to avoid hypocrisy?

Hypocrisy is frustrating because the solution to it—confession and repentance—is so easy, yet we’re nevertheless willing to go to enormous lengths to avoid doing so. Think about it—if you’re a member of a healthy church community and are harboring a secret sin, you have a lot of good reasons to go straight to your pastor and confess that sin. You know that:

• God will forgive you.
• Your pastor, family, and church community will likely support you should you need help overcoming the sin.
• Your life will be immensely more enjoyable without the stress of hiding a sin from everybody you know.
• The longer you wait to confess it, the harder things are going to be when it is inevitably found out.

Yet despite these reasons to repent, we find it amazingly hard to do so. You might think that simple embarassment causes people to cover up their sins, but can that really explain our illogical aversion to repentance? In the case of especially serious issues like sexual addiction, we often pass up the chance to deal with the sin early on (when there’s much less embarassment or impact on the community), and instead let it fester for years until it finally grows big enough to wreck entire families. Christians know of the forgiving power of their God, and they also know about the consesquences of hidden sin, yet they choose to hide rather than confess it.

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