Beloved (BE-Love)

At the end of Cambodia and into Vietnam Jesus was teaching me more about the word beloved. This has been a new concept for me throughout the race that the Lord my God would call me his beloved.  For the first 9 months many of the things I learned were focused on how God loved me, how he wanted to romance and pursues me, and how he was the only one I needed!

To think the creator of the universe calls me his beloved astounds me. But it is true I am his beloved and he is mine, God tells us in Song of Solomon what that looks like the closest way we can figure it out which is with marriage.

By the end of Vietnam I had a pretty good grasp on the meaning of being my God’s beloved. However he showed me that the word beloved also is be-love. We are called to love others because God first loved us. God loved us so much that he sent his son to die on the cross for My sins. That is a great love that we are called to show to others no matter how they make us feel. God did not show us conditional love, when we were sinners he loved us.

Why do we think we are better than God and don’t have to love people that are harder to love?
It is not ok for us to have conditional love for others we MUST love like God loves.

Now on the race I had not struggled with loving my teammates or people on my squad. However at the end of Vietnam I had the realization that I would need a reminder to be love when I got home because it might not be as easy there. I went one night and got a tattoo of the word beloved on my left wrist with the “be, and d” in a bolder font for a reminder to be love. I did not expect to need the reminder until getting home, but daddy knew better. 

                             I am
BELOVED

Since being in Malaysia it has been a struggle for me to love my teammates the way I know I’m called to love them.  I have been living in community for 11 months with no space and my patience was getting thin.However that is no excuses, love is not based on circumstances. One of my pack mates (a team we are partnered with) told me I needed to read 1 Corinthians 13, now if you have been in the things of God for any amount of time you know that is the LOVE chapter. She said if I could read that and answer yes to all the ways we are to walk in love than I was alright but if there was even one of the ways I was not walking in I needed to fix it. I of course took the advice and sat down and read the chapter. Jesus was showing me things left in right throughout the chapter of how I was not walking in love. Jesus did not let us pick and choose the characteristics of love. He did not say you only have to do half of these or just one characteristic to every person. Jesus has called us to have all these characteristics with everyone we encounter whether we know them or not.

 Nowhere in the chapter does it say you get to choose who you love, or when you love them. For that matter nowhere in the bible does it say that, instead we are told to love our neighbors.

While walking this out any time I was frustrated or not walking in the love for my teammates that I should be walking in, I would stop what I was doing and go read the famous chapter 13. I’m not going to tell you that it’s still not a process and that I have it all right now.

But what I will tell you is it took me asking for forgiveness and admitting I was not loving them the way I should be, to finally be able to hear the Lord speaking in those areas.

 It meant humbly coming before my daddy and telling him I messed up and needed his help and his eyes to love these people. Sometimes it meant in those moments I was not walking in love to say out loud
Love is… and insert whatever part of the scripture was that I was struggling with.

To Be Love to someone is not always easy but it is what we are called to do after all scripture tells us that is how people will know we are followers of Jesus Christ. And that is the ultimate goal, right we want people to know we are different and what is different  is that Jesus lives on the inside of us!

 

1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.
2 If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing.
3-7 If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love. Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn't want what it doesn't have. Love doesn't strut, Doesn't have a swelled head, Doesn't force itself on others, Isn't always "me first," Doesn't fly off the handle, Doesn't keep score of the sins of others, Doesn't revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps going to the end.
8-10 Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
11 When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.
12 We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
13 But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.