What’s So Great About Love?
Aug22
It may be the cheesy romantic comedy I just watched with Michelle, or it may be watching a father teach his son to walk on the sidewalk outside my house, or hearing Cindy talk about her chosen lifestyle of fostering children, but there seems something so incredible about love, about choosing to love, about being thrown into loving someone. We talk about love all the time – particularly in Christian communities. We all know the commandments, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself,” and most of us remember Jesus’ prayer for us in John 17 that we, the people of God, will be known by the way we love one another.
But what is it about love that is so important to God? Could it be that in the processing of loving others we find ourselves set free? What does this freedom look like? It is the freedom that there is more than enough love for everyone, that my God is so in love with those around me and he has set me free to love on them with her love. As I stare out our dining room window at the courtyard in the middle of The Bluffs, I am struck with the thought that I do indeed love my neighborhood. I watch the little girl climb across the monkey bars and actually feel love toward her. I watch the father work on his four-wheeler with his son – and I love them. I have come to the realization that as I chose to believe in, to care for, and to care about this community, I began to love it. We’ve been here three months – though it feels far longer – and are only beginning to know our people, our neighborhood.
As I ponder the longing of Jesus’ heart that we be a people of love, I am overwhelmingly convinced that it is for our own good that we love. Yes, indeed, love benefits others, but the greater the love, the easier the call of God. When Jesus says, “come to me… for my yoke is easy and my burden light” he must make this claim in the light that what is done out of love carries no weight or burden.
As we fall in love with a boy or a girl, in those moments of indescribably joy and intimacy, we come to a place where we would do almost anything for that person and not consider it a burden. Could it be that Jesus would have us come to that same place for our community? Could it be that the way of love is about not just loving each other, but about our neighborhoods, villages, and cities? That in the loving of our neighborhoods, the things that become so burdensome and annoying suddenly are found to be fun, easy, and incredibly joyful? Could it be that the answer to growing gang problems, to broken families, to poverty and isolation is as simple as falling in love, not just with one or two people, but with a neighborhood?
It is scary, frightening to fall in love. It’s terrifying to fall in love with one person, let alone a community. But anyone who has ever fallen in love knows the moment when that fear is completely overwhelmed and defeated by the joy of actually loving that person. All I’m saying is that the same thing happens when we fall in love with a community. Let’s move beyond our fear, let us not be conquered, but let us become conquerors in him who loves us so dearly, and let us begin to fall in love with our neighborhoods. As we do this we will find freedom and joy in falling in love that does not exist anywhere else. Perhaps it is for this reason that Jesus so clearly points us toward love. To fall in love, that it may set us free.
