When I do
not love someone the way I ought, it is because I love myself more. It is the great paradox of life. To love in the purest way is to die to one’s
self. The world rails against selfless
love and cannot comprehend it.
Chris and I wondered at how we could
love a small little family that we had never met before. We recognized real genuine love and care for
these people welling up in our hearts.
How does this happen?
We love because Someone loved us
first. I cannot love like that, no
expectations - no strings attached, if I had not known a love like that
from someone else first. It is a mystery
and a miracle. It is the love of God
that compels us to put another before ourselves.
If it was dependent on me, I could
never love sacrificially without any expectations. It must come from somewhere else. I can be thinking only of myself and caring
only for my own desires, and then from somewhere inside of me, a love and care evidences
itself. I cannot love apart
from a power that comes from God.
And so, our little church family
gathered around total strangers, motivated by love. The love was mutual. They had the same power to love, and we felt
it.
For the rest of the day, whenever I
spoke with someone who had met this family, their welfare was on their
mind. How can we help? How can we pray? What can I do? We want them to know the type of love we have
for one another.
As my husband said, “It is not wrong
that we would be drawn to them and care for them like that.” We were both quiet. We knew we were experiencing a love that does
not come from this world. I knew we had
an encounter that was planned from before the beginning of time. Yes God, You care, You use us, You love
us.
What did this meeting of strangers,
that I now love, do in me? It made me
want to look up and out all the more.
Who else will I meet? Who else
will need prayer? Who else will I have
in my home? Who else will I be privileged
to love?
As Ann Voskamp has said, ”When God
is our God, we take His people as our people.” I hope the paper with my name
and number and email causes them to know how much they are loved. Loved by strangers, who never knew them, but
who count them as their brother and their sister.
~Your Fellow Sojourner
[15] And
she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods;
return after your sister-in-law.” [16] But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to
leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and
where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my
God. [17] Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the
LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”
[18] And when Naomi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said
no more.
(Ruth 1:15-18 ESV)
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