Archive for the ‘Love’ Category

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Choosing Sides

November 8, 2024

We’re back from two weeks of travels. A car at one parking lot sported a bumper sticker “Jesus Is (insert your particular politics)”.

Jesus, in fact, never directly addressed that particular statement.

I understand the deep need to feel that God is on our side.

Maybe I pray that God will support Liverpool to win and Manchester City to lose. Or, to use an American analogy, the Kansas City Chiefs to win and the San Francisco 49ers to lose. Perhaps the other side prays the same thing only in reverse.

Does God really pick these sides? Can we really constrain the God that created the universe and everything within it to fit our desires?

I can see praying for the spirit to infuse my body and soul with healing power. To provide me strength and wisdom to make the wise decisions. To fill me with capacity to love others—even those I feel like not loving.

Let us ponder questions such as these. What kind of life did Jesus live? If we are living like Jesus, would we plaster a divisive bumper sticker on our car? Maybe instead a bumper sticker that said simply “Love Others Always.”

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My Yoke Is Easy

October 8, 2024

Some Christians make being a Christian into hard work.

They try to be a “good” Christian.

That is a formula for constant frustration.

Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden light.”

Why don’t we try taking him at his word.

It’s simple. Love God. Love your neighbor.

Yes, love can lead to hard work—sitting with someone in pain or helping someone move from one house to another.

But the idea is simple. Don’t get on the gerbil wheel of endless striving. Notice when someone needs some help and pitch in.

Posted in Attitude, Compassion, Love, Service | Leave a Comment »

Only Love Heals

August 6, 2024

Hate often evolves from fear. Usually that fear of anticipation of perceived threat. Fear of humans who are different from us.

These two phrases describe dealing with hatred.

Hatred never ceases with hatred, but by love alone is healed.

Hate cannot drive out hate; Only love can overcome hate.

Hate is a vicious cycle like the swirling of water released into a drain. The cycle must be broken for peace—peace among people and peace within people—to be realized.

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Focus for the Day

August 5, 2024

How can I love myself and the world more today?

Jesus knew—we must begin with our heart. What is the status? Where is it residing? Is it God or things he once asked.

How can I love myself more?

The orientation of our hearts settled into the right direction, then we are capable of looking outward.

How do we love others more?

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A Way of Life

August 2, 2024

All of my study, training, reading, listening about Jesus points to just one thing—following Jesus is a way of life.

You can argue different theologies. You can argue what belief means.  You can argue about the roles and status of women, gay people, poor people, rich people, people of different tribes or races. These are merely arguments.

Jesus left just two commandments as “requirements” for his followers.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and strength, and mind.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

The word love in these commands is an action verb. It is what you do. How you act. How you relate to other people. And he left no room for doubt—other people meant, well, all other people.

This is what having faith in Jesus means. Actively loving in the giving sense of the word.

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Intentional Love

June 17, 2024

Intentional Love

The instruction came to me

Practice intentional Love

Not accidental, nor obligatory

Practice love with intent, on purpose.

Not mindlessly, nor solely from duty;

As Jesus loved, so shall we love.

His last instruction to all of us.

Leave your study this morning 

With intent to show love with every action.

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When Love Meets

January 24, 2024

When love meets pain, it becomes compassion.

When love meets happiness, it becomes joy.

Joy is an expression of the awakened heart, a quality of enlightenment. When we live in the present, joy often arises for no reason.

When I came across these thoughts, I was compelled by the spirit to pause and consider. I love that thought of “when love meets…” What a powerful picture.

And I thought about how joy is a fruit of God’s Spirit according to the Apostle Paul.

Then I remembered this little folk song from the time when I sold my electric guitar and bought a nylon-stringed acoustic one and sang folk songs. Many from Catholics in the mid-to-late 60s. Like this one written by Sister Miriam Therese Winter, Joy Is Like The Rain.

I saw raindrops on the river, Joy is like the rain.

Bit by bit the river grows, till all at once it overflows.

Joy is like the rain.

Perhaps today I can rest in joy.

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Lighting the Love Candle on the Advent Wreath

December 11, 2023

In our tradition, a candle in a wreath is lighted for each of the four Sundays leading up to Christmas when the fifth candle is lighted. The first, second, and fourth candles are traditionally purple. They denote Hope, Love, and Peace. The third is traditionally pink denoting Joy, sort deriving from another ancient tradition of a Joy Sunday celebration. Leading up to the commemoration of Jesus birth the lights grow brighter as Jesus was the Light of the World.

This Sunday we contemplated Love. John, Jesus’s friend and author of the fourth gospel, used light and dark as the theme of his story. He also is famous for making love the core idea. God is love. Jesus is love.

Love not so much as an emotion. Love is a way of acting toward yourself and others. Can you pray for others? Can you perform acts large and small for others? Can you treat others and yourself with kindness and compassion?

During this week of Advent we could hardly do better than contemplate how we love. And how our love appeared yesterday. And how we will respond with love today.

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Can there be peace without justice?

November 13, 2023

People of the world have lives so much better than ever before. In general, people are healthier. More people live under democracy despite movements to return to authoritarian rule. Most people have electricity, heat, mobile phones (those led to an increase in literacy among other things).

And yet, our 24-hour breathless news cycle leads people, especially in the USA but other places as well, to believe that they are worse off. Indeed, there remain too many places where anger and fear drive terrorist attacks, wars, killings.

Can peace exist without justice?

Justice without humility?

Humility without faith?

Reduction of anger and fear without living a with-God life. Recognizing others as God’s children?

We need fewer driven, successful entrepreneurs and politicians. We need more people practicing kindness, justice, and, yes, love.

Posted in Justice, Love, Peace | Leave a Comment »

Why Hate?

October 23, 2023

I read the blog of a technology innovator. He is Jewish, but non-religious, from New York City.

That always reminds me of a sales rep I had in NYC in the 1980s. When I met her, she said hi, I’m a typical New York Jew. I said, great, I have no idea what that means. She also thought that since I was from Ohio that I was a hayseed farmer. After we went to work making sales calls, we just became the marketer and salesperson trying to make a living.

Back to the tech blogger. He recently asked on his blog, “Why do people hate Jews?”

I have thought about that often during the past week since he posted it in light of the fighting going on right now.

I have no answers from psychology or analysis.

I have no answers to other questions of why one group chooses to hate another. It’s happening all around the world. It’s happening in your neighborhood.

An answer easy to say and evidently impossible to live comes from a teaching by Jesus—Love your enemies.

Maybe, just maybe, we could go out today and show kindness, kindness from the heart, to a person of a different tribe or ethnic identity or sexual identity? Do it twice and it may become a practice—a true spiritual practice.

Posted in Ethics, Love | Leave a Comment »

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