I’m a numbers person. I accidentally memorize phone numbers, credit cards, skus for registers, I can’t help it.
11 months
334 days
480,960 minutes (assuming my math is right…not my strong point) That’s crazy to me!
“Seasons of Love” from Rent is one of my favorite life songs.
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee? In inches, in miles in laughter and strife…
How do you measure a year in a life?
Love.
I realize that Rent is so far out of context from a missions trip but I still think its applicable. Jesus said one huge thing: Love. Just Love. Not Love them if they’re nice to you. Love them if they’re clean, Love them if… not Love them because… just Love. Love as God has loved you. That’s it. No stipulations. If God has decided to love us while we were still sinners then who are we to decide who is worthy enough to get his free love! If a musical about friends, to be quite honest, dying from crazy life choices is able to understand the concept of loving everyone, why can’t we?!
Casting Crowns definitely said it best in “If we are the body”
Jesus paid much too high a price
For us to pick and choose who should come
And we are the body of Christ
Someone at training camp said that when you find yourself not liking someone, it’s probably one of two things: 1) they possess a characteristic that you also posses and you see your own actions in them 2) they posses a characteristic that you desire.
#1 hit me like a truck at training camp. I found myself interacting with this one person sparingly. Whenever I would talk to them, I would feel like they were distant and that they didn’t like me which I knew was probably ridiculous. Later when I got angry about something dumb, a harmless interaction with them, a sweetheart named Taylor came over and talked to me and prayed with me. I remembered what I had heard the next morning and God smacked me over the head with the action I had been ignoring in myself. (Side note… I now love this person a lot!)
I’m going to go with #2 on this whole love concept for the world.
I think one of the reasons that Christians have such a hard sometimes is that we look at the world and get angry and jealous. We excuse it by saying “Hey I mean, Jesus flipped a table up in the temple…he got mad too…it’s ok to have righteous anger”. We look at the world and say hey that’s not fair. So many acts of kindness have been thrust upon me by non-christians. I think we look at that and say, well they don’t have Christ so it’s not as good as my act of kindness. We get so caught up in the justification of why we’re being kind that we forget to do it in the first place. Furthermore we are doing it for the wrong reasons. An act of charity will not return void. Giving a child a drink of water will benefit that child regardless of your motivations. However, Paul caught on to this concept pretty quickly.
“If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” 1 Cor. 13:3 ESV
Every single one of your actions dictates not only your future, but the future of others. I find that fascinating. Think about how many people you see on a daily basis. Granted you may look a little like the joker if your grinning all the time but you get the idea. You don’t know if that man who looks dejected was just fired. One act of kindness, a smile, can change the world.
Each one of those 525,600 minutes in a year is an opportunity to LOVE.
Katie
