“Our love for human beings, Jesus told us, will be the sacrament, the visible sign that He’s among us. This is how the world will recognize Him. And the world doesn’t see Him, because they don’t see our love”. I read these words of Brennan Manning earlier this week and as I have reflected over what it means to love, to show love, to live rooted in love… I have come to believe that love manifests itself through compassion. I honestly cannot picture love without picturing one who is compassionate…one who is empathetic not just in word but in deed. Love is an action word. However, it’s not just being nice, it’s not just doing what is expected or required. Love is not about being convicted to do the right thing. Love is moral certainly, but moreover, there is an element of mercy, an overwhelming sense of peace that transcends all understanding as we walk beside the hurting, the hated, the feeble and the frail.
Love swells from a heart that has experienced the tenderness of Jesus in our lives, one who can picture a battered, unidentifiable body hanging from a cross in our place, one who can identify with the prodigal son who humbly, shamefully returns to his father and is not only engulfed in the arms of his father, but forgiven. It also radiates from one who claims to have no testimony because the Lord has spared them of abuse in its multiple forms, and by God’s grace, their faith hasn’t waned as they witness such heartache and turmoil that seems to abound from every crevice. To inhale the sweet fragrance of such tender love, to experience such forgiveness, such grace…my heart swells with love and exhales a love that is not my own but a love that supersedes my own thoughts and judgments. A kind of love that sees others through the eyes and heart of Jesus…a love that oozes such mercy, such compassion that one cannot help but to be love in action. My words seem feeble and yet my heart beats harder, beats with conviction, with purpose, while my fingers fail to find the words adequate to express such…such love, a love I have not only experienced… changing me from the inside out, but is the very breath that gives me life.
I want my life to be a reflection of Christ’s love, His hope, and His tender grace to others. I have often prayed that I would see others the way He sees them…this has brought me to my knees countless times. It has caused my heart to beat wildly out of empathy for others. It has spurred me to love beyond the spoken, well-intended words. And not just for the likable, the hurting, or the disabled, but for the ruthless, self-centered, users, and manipulators. I am still a work in progress as honestly some people are easier to love than others. Yet Christ commands us to love our enemy (Matthew 5:44)… Can I really love my enemy? Can I have compassion for my enemy? Can I root for my enemy? I don’t believe it is possible if my heart is not beating in sync with Christ’s. The greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind. The second greatest commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:37-39). How are we doing? Are we loving them with all we have within us? Are we, as Christians, loving differently than others? How is our version of love different? Can others see it? Love needs to move beyond the same old rhetoric that the world has heard over and over again, that the world has lost hope in because our words do not match our actions. Our actions rooted in love need to offer hope to others.
“We are surrounded by people who are hungry and thirsty and naked in their souls, and they come to us hungry for understanding, thirsty for affirmation, naked with loneliness, and wanting to be covered with the mantle of our genuine tenderness” (Brennan Manning) and so often we do not see beyond the surface…their needs, their hurts…because our focus is narrow or maybe we have come to believe it is someone else’s problem or perhaps we ourselves feel inadequate or…that we are too busy. We need to come to the place where we welcome God’s interruptions…to love beyond words, beyond church walls. To love practically, fully, without obligation but out of desire to communicate hope and acceptance. What a gift we have the ability to give.
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