Loving Other People:

“I love my dog more than people.”  “I would rather spend time with my cat than other people.”  “I do not like people.”  “I want to get away from other people.”  These are common statements on social media or things you will hear other people say.  I am sure I have also felt and said these things before as well.  I will commonly make the joke with my parents that I only facetime with them, so I can see the boys (my parent’s dogs).  Many people, including myself, have been brought up often crying more at a movie where the dog dies as opposed to a person.  

Why am I bringing up these examples?  Well, because I believe we as a society have fallen into a habit of not caring about people.  Even when we are joking, we are still making a lot of comments about not loving people.  This is because it can be very hard to love people.  We can find it very challenging to love all their faults, their mistakes, the times they have hurt us, and the lack of trust we have in our common man.  However, as we know, we have been called to love people.  This is actually the very second command in the ten commandments, which is held as one of the two highest.  

I have been reading a book called, “Daring to Hope,” by Katie Davis Majors.   This book is a great book about mission work being done all throughout the world.  This book does a good job explaining Katie’s work with the women and especially children of Uganda.  She has adopted many children, being the mother of 15.  One quote I have really loved from this book so far has been, “You and I both know the truth of it: loving people is hard.  It brings us to the very end of ourselves. And as much as we are trained to avoid it, the end of ourselves is such a very sweet place to be.”  (pg.49).

To correspond to this book I am reading, at church we then continued to go through the Ten Commandments.  The commandment we went over this past week was to not murder.  This seemed to be a very simple commandment. There are many of us who have not committed murder or anything even remotely close.  It certainly sounds easier than honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy, or to honor our father and mother and all those who are in authority over us.  However, our pastor went even farther than just “do not murder.”  He reminded us that over everything, we are to honor life.  We are to honor the Lord through our love of people.  

This can be showing the people in our lives more attention.  There have been many blog posts where I have mentioned spending time getting to know those who are around us.  This could be spending more time off of our phones, so we have the opportunity to talk to them while we are riding on the plane next to each other.  This could be spending time smiling and caring about those individuals who are in the grocery store shopping amongst us.  This could even be spending time talking to the coworkers who sometimes are not the most kind.  

It is not easy to love people.  People have done things to hurt us, and they do things to make us frustrated.  However, we have also been called many times to love them, even amidst this. It can be very hard to love all people.  It can also be hard to love people when we are tired, when we are hurting or are emotional, or when we are incredibly stressed.  These are all factors that make us want to run away for solace and be alone.  I am not saying that here and there, this is a bad thing-it is important to rest and relax, but we also need to be cognizant of trying to love people on a fairly regular basis.  

I have just become more and more aware of my issues with this.  There is a particular person in my life who is very hard to love.  They are a part of one of the groups I work with, so I need to see them a lot in this particular season.  This person is very different from me and treats people differently than I would, they have different opinions than I have.  There are many things I need to do better when it comes to working with this particular person in order to do a better job loving them like Christ wants me to do.

The challenge for this week is to think about your relationships with the people around you. Is there one person or multiple people who you struggle to love?  Are there times you want to walk away or even run away from people because you don’t want to spend time loving them?  Are there times you just struggle to show love, the same way God has told us to love?  Then after you make those realizations, find ways to show this love; this selfless, kind, and patient love Christ wants us to have for people.

To end this blog post, I want to give one more quote from the book by Katie Davis Majors.  She is working through the pain of losing a loved one.  She is working through the pain of loving someone and then losing them.  However, she writes a very meaningful paragraph on the importance of loving people, even when they are hard to love or even when we possibly get hurt after they pass. “In the dark season, He doesn’t leave.  In fact, He draws near.  He whispers that loving    people is not in vain because in loving people, we know more of Him, regardless of the end result. God is love, and as we love in His name, He is glorified.” (pg. 83) We love people because ultimately this is showing love to God and it is making us overall closer to Him.