Thursday, January 03, 2013

Love

Happy New Years everyone! We hope that you are having a wonderful start to 2013 and that your Holiday season was very blessed.

I will admit that the start of the season saw me feeling rather discouraged. I was so very very homesick, struggling with jealousy of those who were "home" in the states and terribly missing my family and friends there. God is gracious and he cares. He held me and brought me through it and I am happy to say that we had a lovely Christmas here and we have so much to be thankful for with the start of this new year. I am grateful that his mercies are not new every year, but daily. Praise God!

But I'd like to talk about something else today.

You know, about a year ago, maybe a little more, I was reading through 1 Corinthians 13. I had begun reading it through every day, hoping that by doing so I would understand better how to incorporate the attributes found there into my own life. I had really been struggling. I was teaching my children love and gentleness, patience and kindness, but not following through myself. These were areas that I desperately needed to work on and I knew it. Our household verse was "Let your gentleness be evident to all" Yet I felt that my gentleness was evident to no one.
Around this time I read somewhere about a man who committed to reading through 1 Cor. 13 every day for a month and it "changed his life."
Perfect! I thought, a clear cut, easy recipe for how I can fix this in myself. And so I began.
But it seemed to me that the harder I tried to live with gentleness, patience and all that is wrapped up in that beautiful little word LOVE, the worse I became at it -the snappier, more irritable and impatient I grew. Oh I was so disheartened.

Life became busy with moving and all the big changes that came last summer, though always in the back of my mind I was giving a concerted -and often failing- effort to be more loving, more gentle.

Fast forward to a week or so ago at our newly begun women's Bible Study meeting. A small group of very special young women in our Church have committed to getting together once a week to study the Word together. It is a beautiful thing and has blessed and encouraged me in numerous ways already. On this day we were discussing the Love of God and taking about such verses as John 3:16. One girl read 1 Corinthians 13 out loud and another pointed out that this section was more about believers loving each other, not specifically about God's love.

Then it struck me.

"But-but it is about God's love!" I thought excitedly. It was like an epiphany. At that moment in my heart God re-taught me something that I had heard many times over the years about God's love lived out in us. For not only is living out our lives and loving others with the kind of love described in 1 Cor. 13 very difficult, it is, in fact, impossible. Utterly and completely impossible -apart from Christ. Only when we have God's love in our hearts -and are allowing Him to work, instead of trying to take care of things ourselves (something I DO need to re-learn just about daily)- only then can we love our families, or friends, our sisters and brothers in Christ, and anyone else we meet with the agape love described in Scripture.

I felt at that moment as though a weight had been lifted and a veil removed from my eyes -a veil I had likely put in place myself by trying to figure things out on my own, instead of relying solely on Him and being sensitive to His guidance. I feel a deep peace now, I remember that only through Him can I treat others with true grace and love.

There will still be -will always be- struggles, as long as I am in this world, but I know that I can persevere through Him. And that is the beautiful hope for all of us. A hope which has already been fulfilled in His eternal Love.

No comments: