Thursday, December 11, 2008
Love All by Pastor Chuck Carlson
How can I love the unlovely? Good question. Jesus calls us "to love God with all of our heart, soul and mind. This the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Matthew 22:37)
Advent is learning to love as God loves. It begins in recognizing my relatedness to God. Being open to experience and witness God’s power and energy at work in life’s mysteries makes it possible for me to endure anything that life can or may do to me. No time is wasted in trying to reduce God to my particular logic. In simple quietness I give myself in love to God.
I’m challenged to share the love God gives me with my neighbor, even to the extent of loving an enemy. Allow me to leave you with a thought from Howard Thurman in Meditations of the Heart:
"I shall study how I may be
tender without being soft,
gracious without
being ingratiating;
kind without being sentimental;
and understanding
without being judgmental.
Here in the quietness, I shall give
myself in
love to my neighbors." (p. 47)
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