As a woman, when it comes to love, I want to be pursued. I want to be called and asked out (obviously after the Race). Being the pursuer is awkward for me; however, in Swaziland I had to learn to pursue.
Loving others is hard. Some resist love. Some are hard to love. Not every kid is cute and huggable all the time. Not everyone acts toward us as we think they should, and then we think we have an excuse to withhold love. However, the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves (Matt 22:39). Yeshua said that all of the Law and the Prophets, all of God’s ways, hang on the two greatest commandments (Matt 22:40). Maybe that’s because in comparison to loving God with our whole being and loving our neighbor as ourselves everything else is easy.
Entering Swaziland, God told me to love. “Okay Papa. Let’s work on love.” I foolishly thought it wouldn’t be too hard. Kiddos are easy to love. Five months with the squad I thought had laid a good foundation to loving them. I had learned from my first team how to love; therefore, loving this new team would be easy. Right? Again, I was to learn that when God calls me to learn a new skill there will be challenges along the way.
The children of El Shaddai not only come from broken homes, but have also experienced years of Race squads loving and leaving them. They were more reserved at first, waiting to see if we really cared. They did not run out and open their arms immediately like the children in Cambodia. I had to pursue my buddies every day. This looked like reading books to them from outside their dorm window because they knew I could not enter their dorm. This looked like sitting beside them as they played with other children, ignoring me and speaking only saswati. This looked like hugging a stiff child. But over time Akeelah and Nokuphila saw that I cared. They opened up, let me in, and broke my heart in the process. Three weeks was not long enough to spend with my buddies.
Five months of living in community with a group of people does not mean that relationships with new teammates will come easily. My new teammates need to be pursued. I have to get out of my comfort zone and seek out time to spend with each of them. Pursuing my teammates requires taking advantage of opportunities to learn what they care about and what they were going through. Asking a teammate to eat dinner together or to sit and chat.
The hardest pursuit of all is when God says a difficult squadmate is to be pursued when all I want to do is hide from them. This all squad month brought to light a frustration with a squadmate that I did not fully realize. Many times this month God told me she is worth pursuing, but I argued that her actions and words put me down. The enemy wants discord. He wants to disturb our unity and to keep us at odds with each other. Pursuing this squadmate looked like hard, honest conversations where we each had to be vulnerable. Pursuit looked like fighting for a relationship and both agreeing to continue to work for it.
What I learned through this month was that I cannot love properly. The only way to love others is to allow God to love through me. My love is conditional, but when I ask God for His eyes, His ears, His heart, and His courage I can love the easy and the challenging.
