Recently I got a chance to share with my fellowship about this mission trip. Given this opportunity, I went ahead and decided to show some videos and make a presentation of all the countries I would be going to. However, I knew that I didn't want to leave without sharing more about what God was currently working in my own life and how I wanted to see Him work on the mission field. I decided there was no better way to do that than with the spoken word poetry that I was inspired to write earlier this week. One of my prayers leaving Los Angeles was that the Lord would tie up loose ends in my relationships with all the people I had encountered here in the past four years. Among people, there are always some souls that my heart finds easier to love and some that I struggle to love again and again. Love is true when it is intimate, and when love is intimate, love is painful. But oh so painful, intimate, and true is love in the way of Jesus. Hopefully I get to make a video of this later on, because spoken word poetry should really be slammed out rather than typed out.
"What do I expect to see on the world race? I expect to see the world as a gift from a Father who loves us, and I desire to love it as the Father so loved it that he sent His one and only Son. When we read John 3:16 and we hit "world" right after "For God so loved…", it's easy to distance ourselves from it because we imagine that Scripture is referring to the world from our perspective in that verse. And what is our perspective? Well the moment someone says "world", my mind is filled with the images of distant sights, distance faces, and most tragically, distant souls. It is both easy and difficult to love something from a distance. It is easy to fall in love from a distance but difficult to stay in love. Because love from a distance is not deep, not costly, and not intimate. You don't realize how shallow it is until someone asks you why you love. You don't realize how cheap it is until you're asked to sacrifice for love. You don't realize how foreign it is until you're asked to examine your love uncomfortably up close. As Christians we say, "We love God's people!" There should be a small disclaimer at the bottom saying, "…at a distance."
But when John says, "For God so loved the world…" he meant it from God's perspective, not ours. And what is God's perspective of the world? As vastly infinite as he is, he is closely personal, because Jesus came down to be Immanuel – God with us. Jesus didn't love the world from a distance, and he also expects His followers not to love from a distance. How many people who call themselves "followers of Jesus" can say that they've loved His people up close? So close that you can smell them, touch them, listen to them, speak to them? So close that they can spit in your face, betray you, hurt you, and murder you? But at the same time, so close to them that you can return to them kiss for spit, reconciliation for betrayal, healing for hurt, and resurrection for murder. So close. So close you want to cry and just give up, drop the cross, and walk away from it. So. Close. But Jesus didn't, and when we choose to follow him daily, we do so with the understanding that with every step we take, we will look more and more like him and less like the boy who showed up to a man's fight. So pray. Pray that we can love the world."
