Love.
When we hear this word, we think of a lot of things. It could be your best friend, spouse, child, family, church, or a billion of other things. We also talk about love all the time. We are constantly throwing around the phrase “I love you,” yet many of us never contemplate what we are saying. Famous philosophers, theologians, poets, and musicians have all tried to describe love only to fall short, but that’s the beautiful thing about it…Love is indescribable! When you love someone, you might come up with this long speech to describe your feelings, only to find yourself stumbling over the empty words. You find that your eloquent speech crumples under the weight of your feelings. Your words fail you. Honestly, I love that. It shows us how powerful love is. Our infinite God made love so wondrous and complex that no earthly being can begin to comprehend it. Love is a lot of things, but here is what God has been teaching me about love over the past 2 years:
Love will wreck you– At the beginning of highschool, I began to forget the love of my heavenly Father. I forgot His beauty and majesty and made Him into someone He isn’t. The only time I would ever talk to Him was to ask Him why He made me to be someone I simply couldn’t be. I was frustrated and desperate to find out who God was. It was a lonely place to be, but out of God’s love and grace, He reached down and brought me above the dark valley to see the light and beauty of who He really is. He touched my still heart and made it beat for Him once more. I saw the gospel in a new light. I was able to look at the severity of mankind’s condition, yet how it was no match for the love of Christ. Our God sent His only Son to lavish grace upon us so that we could be right in our Father’s eyes. THAT’S CRAZY, AND THAT’S LOVE! After that, I began to fall more deeply in love with Jesus everyday. I was wrecked.
Love Does– I think I used to view love as kind of quiet, but that’s not what love is at all. Love doesn’t have boundaries. Love isn’t just telling someone “I love you.” Love is an action. It does stuff! Love is making a way bigger deal out of someone’s birthday than needed. It’s bringing someone chick-fil-a with a balloon that says “you’re the best!” It’s listening to someone’s pointless story because they have value and are worth your time. It’s giving leftover pizza to the homeless on a Sunday afternoon. It’s helping around the house even though you feel like you’d rather die. These things might seem insignificant, but their representative of a much greater love that was shown to us. Because Christ died in our place, we are able to die for others. Not at the magnitude that Christ did obviously, but because He loved us first, we are able to love Him and His people in return. It’s a privilege that not many of us take advantage of because we’re selfish. Christ showed us the most powerful love of all and even taught us how to love, but we say, “no thanks, Me instead” everyday. This isn’t what the love of Christ does. The love of Christ is so great that it demands us to respond. It demands a wild and passionate love for His people who are created in his image, and it also demands that we die to ourselves everyday. Christ calls us to do small things with great love and never says that it’s going to be easy…only that it’s worth it.
I never thought I would take a gap year. In fact, if you had told me in November that I would be traveling to 5 different countries for 9 months to share the gospel, I would have laughed and said “I wish!” Unfortunately, I didn’t think God was capable of allowing me the privilege to do such a thing. I thought my only option was to go to college and have to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life when I’m only 18! But thankfully God was much bigger than my cynical and “woe is me” attitude. He had to teach me a lot about trusting and listening to Him, and finally, I did. So here I am! It’s been amazing to see the Lord laying the foundation before I knew I was going on this trip. He was teaching me about His love because He knew it was imperative that I understood before He took me on this journey. I’m going to be doing a lot of loving on this trip, and a lot of it will be hard. Leaving the the ones I love most to go love strangers is daunting to say the least, but I believe that’s when God moves most. I know He will continue to shape me into the person He wants me to be and teach me much more about love. And I simply can’t wait!!!
