Day 16 -- Loving into the Fray

If you could all see me now, you'd be laughing at me. This late afternoon I ran off to Leesburg where the Synod's annual conference on ministry is being held at the Methodist Retreat Center. There's no wireless in our rooms, so I'm sitting in the front seat of the car outside of the now locked public building that radiates the local access point.

The ends I have reach for to simply blog. Oh my! You are all worth it! You should know I feel that way about you.

In this weekend's sermon I talked about the nature of anxiety...the way it tends to shut down our higher capacities for thinking and problem solving and forces us into binary thinking where everything is black and white, in or out, his side/her side, fight or flight. The fight or flight option is interesting in particular to me, and I want to work at it a bit more than I did in my sermon. I maintained this weekend that we more often choose running from each other in conflict than fighting because from an evolutionary standpoint, the cost of fighting can be so much higher. In a real life or death situation, you could actually die. You could also be so seriously wounded that you are maimed for life and the things you do now and take for granted might become so much more difficult.

Most of us aren't in life or death situations when we're running from each other. Instead we're fleeing perceived emotional duress and harm...choosing the options of ongoing resentful and broken relationships, a slow sort of poison, over the fast potential resolution (or harm) that comes with confronting the issues and people in our lives that need us to stand face to face with them.

I was thinking about this dynamic in conjunction with the sort of love we're called to in Jesus' Great Commandment. It's hallmark is "commitment." To the best of it's ability, it hangs in there. It doesn't run. It refuses to run.

It flat out absolutely refuses to run.

Which brings me to a fundamental and key implication for love. Love NEVER guarantees that there won't be hurt in our lives. No. Love calls us into relationship, into the fray, and asks us to be vulnerable. Love asks us to engage the "other," in full sight and belief in the other's value and worth, even when they aren't demonstrating it. It forces you to be open to whatever the "other" might bring, even if they are harboring knives, bombs, or just the sorts of words that break hearts.

Love. We don't practice it with each other, because the perceived cost is too high. There's to much to lose, to much potential hurt. And so we hide from each other.

We hide.

But Jesus didn't. His commitment was too wide, and too deep; his love so powerful it reached clear through the death his love made him vulnerable to, and into the resurrection itself. All because he was committed to YOU.

I wonder if today, Jesus might not be asking us again, to open ourselves up to love, and all of its potential for beauty as well as pain, and to trust him and his resurrection, that through him, come what may, there will be only ultimately life for us if we love like that.

My prayer for you today is one for commitment; that you would love vulnerably and would trust the rest to the God in Jesus who raises even the dead.

God loves you, and I do too...

Pastor Nathan