Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Love - Where do I start?

This post will contain a lot of links. I won't make it a habit, I promise, but please bear with me. Last week, I almost wrote a blog post titled "Satan Reads My Blog", because it seemed like the only reasonable explanation for the difficult to love week I was having. The kids were having a hard time settling back into a normal routine after holidays and Daddy being home for over a week, and I was having a hard time tolerating everyone and everything. I was really trying hard to be loving to my family, but they just weren't being very cooperative. On Tuesday, I read a post from the Compassion blog written by their president and CEO that led me to believe that my problem was that I should have started with evaluating and working on my love for God before looking at home. Well that made sense. So I decided to shift my focus. I tried to pray more and read the Bible more. I'm not saying that it didn't help at all, but I was still having a hard time not exploding at most of the people in my path (a reaction that really isn't THAT common for me).

This continued for what seemed like weeks but was actually only two days. Then there was a blog post from Shaun Groves where he was reliving a lot of his past and evaluating different parts of his life. Then he said, " I wasn’t a good boy because I was good but because I was scared of being bad. Scared of throwing up, of getting caught, of being talked about, of disappointing." That was me as a kid, too, and I thought it was funny that he had that same trait. It occurred to me that I was still living in some of that. I was trying to love God harder and better, but I was still doing it with my own strength, because I said that this was my goal for this year and obviously I had to start with the most important. I mean, how can I love my family well if I can't love God well.

Fast forward a few days to Sunday and this is where I confess to not paying much attention to the church newsletter this week. Every song we sang was about God's love. The sermon text was John 3:16. God's love. Not mine. Not for Him. Not for my kids or my husband or the people who run me over in Wal-Mart or the developing world. God's love. And sometimes I think he loves us enough to let us have a crappy week and choose the wrong doors to open so we can get to where he wants us. Surely he could have hit me over the head with this truth with some of the songs I had been listening to and the books and Bible passages I've been reading. But He chose to wait. His love is perfect and until I can just dwell in that, I won't be any better at loving the rest of the world.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I love this and I love you.
True.