Loving Backwards

They will know us by our love.

Scripture declares that people who don’t know the Lord will know him by the way we love each other in the body of Christ. If Jesus is really real, if the Holy Spirit is really within us and if one of God’s names is Love, then how we love each other will be a demonstration of God’s heart here on earth.

When I was in high school, being a Christian meant going to Pittsburgh and Brazil on mission trips to the inner city and the flavella to love on total strangers by giving them the gospel and working on their houses. Yet I didn’t chance talking to my own friends across the lunch table from me about Jesus because it would have been an unpopular thing to do. And I certainly didn’t love my parents by obeying them when they asked me to clean my room or be home from curfew without throwing them an attitude along with the reluctant obedience. Me going to Pittsburgh and Brazil was certainly love, and I will look back on those seasons with a full heart, but it’s easy to love when you go and do that for two weeks and then get back to your life that’s all about you.

Later on in Berkeley Jason and I spent our Saturdays once a month working with Oakland’s ministry to the homeless. It felt like a sacrifice because we loved our Saturdays together, loved exploring the greater Bay Area traveling and hiking and backpacking, so to take a Saturday kind of changed our weekends. This was a similar love to going on a mission trip but it was a good extension of it (as backwards as that sounds) because I was learning to do it in my own city. I was seeing some of the same faces each time, I was remembering names, and I was developing a heart over time for the same community. This was certainly a difficult love, but it was still a little disconnected from me and I could compartmentalize it to a Saturday outing. We didn’t work to make many friendships during those two years or hardly even get to know our neighbors, except when an elderly man named Gil across the hall would come out his door at the same time as us.

Acts 1:8 says, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

What’s interesting about how Christians love is that we like to do it backwards. Often times we start by looking to love people at the ends of the earth and work back to our “Jerusalems”. We sign up for missions trips or get on the internet to look for ministries we’ve never heard of before that are exits and interstates and cities away from our home. Nothing is wrong with serving the Judeas and Samarias. What I am suggesting we’ve got backwards is that not many of us know how to start with loving the people right in front of our faces everyday. Me included.

In this season of having three children under two and a husband who has a full time job both at work and also at home, God is giving me a new love. And it’s inside of our Jerusalem. In fact it is within one house within our Jerusalem. It’s my husband and kids.

I’ll tell you. I used to see this very much as not enough. I think I have mentioned in a blog before, a long time ago, that about ten years ago I told my friend, who was a stay at home mom with two little kids, that she was wasting her life. Yes I am a little blunt, and yes that was rude and also not prayed over. But it came from this root I am talking about in this blog. You see, she is an amazing person and has many giftings and I had seen her use her heart and gifts to bless many people in “Samaria” and “to the ends of the earth.” So to see her within one home inside of only “Jerusalem” seemed…like a waste. And I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that most of us struggle to see one house within our Jerusalem as being as valuable as one that is at the ends of the earth. When it comes down to it, there are people within our home and there are people in that home we want to serve at the ends of the earth. Both of them God loves, both of them God wants to see believers love on and both he sends people to. What I am suggesting is that something is more sparkly and interesting and exciting and flashy about the ends of the earth. Don’t you think?

I am also suggesting that even though our home and the immediate influences we have aren’t the most sparkly and flashy, they require the most love. Because no one else really recognizes that love as having a wow factor, so it takes great great humility. It takes the love of Jesus. And it also takes the love of Jesus because we see these people all the time. And we know their ugly parts. And they drive us crazy. The poor family at the ends of the earth doesn’t drive us crazy. No, our heart beats easily for them because they don’t get on our last nerve. All we have is compassion for them and we’re ready to love and serve. But our very household is most likely the most difficult place we will ever carry out the love of Jesus because it is so incessant and ongoing and vulnerable and ever present…and it exposes us.

Our home in “Jerusalem” shows us that we can’t love without Jesus. This is the very place we will experience the love of Christ the most. Because here we come to the end of ourselves. We cannot escape the issues, the struggles within our own home and we are all exposed and we all realize we need the name of God: Love, to fill us. Then we will truly learn what it is like to love everyone in Jerusalem and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

I am learning to love backwards. But if I think about it, God has been preparing me for greater and greater lessons on loving as he has led my heart closer and closer to my own home. Thank you Jesus.