If my life, your life, our lives (as sister and sister, or brother and sister, whoever you are) in community with one another… we do talk, and we do dare to confess our hearts. But do the desires of our hearts align with the actions of our hands and the words out of our mouths.
Do we bear the kind of fruit we’d so hoped and long for?
Or have we decided to avoid those questions. Because it’s a hot, sticky summer, much too humid for thinking about these matters.
We will be raw, our hands will be calloused— no one denies you of that. But what are we working towards? Building walls and idols or are we amidst the work of our Father?
And we just want love and grace, don’t we. But what of justice? What of the undeniable and the supernatural?
Our God is bigger than theological debate over a pipe and beer among friends with mixed beliefs. But do we show it? Do we know it?
I say we because I love us. I love my community, communities, and I propose the same questions to you as I do to myself every single day.
Do we love well? The way we should? With justice, freedom, mercy, at the heart of every action?
Love never fails, right? Love is patient, it isn’t self-seeking. God is Love, and those verses aren’t exclusive to religious tolerance and marriage.
Those verses are for everything. They will know us by our love. And the greatest of these is love. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself…
Do we love so selflessly toward everyone? So deeply toward any person that may come and go through our lives on a day-to-day basis? Do we know that we aren’t the only ones who God counts as sacred?
I have been counted a thief and a liar to my own standards lately, trying to take what wasn’t mine.. trying to say my timing was better than God’s, as if I could scheme my way into purity or to achieve the end promise by x amount of doing, being, etc.
Your way is better, God, Your timing is much more perfect.
I want the kind of love You show me to emanate from my life, contagious in the way that I love others, the way I respect Your lovers, Your people— they are yours, not mine, to use.
I’m not perfect, and my hands will be calloused— but let it be more so because I was at the work of my Father, and loving not just in grace but in truth— because it’s that same truth that brought access to grace, giving us ultimate freedom. It is a relentless love that’s jealous and sweet, and does not give up so easily at the first sign of inconvenience or imperfection.
Let the fruit I bear be as sweet as Yours, sweet to taste and good to the soul.
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