Well, it's official- a few "tough" situations in my life have confirmed exactly what the Lord is doing in my life. I am learning a skill that is foreign to me: love. For the first time in a long time, I feel like I am able to really empathize with people. Not just fake empathy, but actually feel with them.When I'm honest, I guess I don't know what to think about this. The plus? Well, it's certainly what we're called to (or did you think that "weeping with those who are weeping" were throwaway words). Paul is all over the place emotionally- his heart out in the sea, vulnerable to all the changing currents of the people he loved. Whether making the Corinthians' joy his own (2 Cor. 1:24) or experiencing the unceasing anguish that goes along with loving the Jews (Rom. 9), his heart is "wide open" (2 Cor. 6:11)
You know what, though? This way of life- of tying your joys and sorrows to others around you- it sucks. I'm not kidding. Love, relationships where you tie yourself to someone else? Let me tell you, it costs something. It really does. It distracts at work- it can make you less "efficient". It can take huge amounts of energy. I mean, think about it: you will actually have bad moods that you would not have had without hitching your heart and entering in to that person in your life. The easy way is to detach. To fake empathy, to just stick to what you're going through.
God, it's just so much easier to intellectually understand where people are at and throw some advice at them! It just is! But that only kicks a hurting soul when it's down. What hurting people need is someone who's in it with them. Speaking truth in love (Eph. 4:15).
I've always had friends like this, but I guess I just don't think I ever understood what it costs to love like this. On the other hand, I don't think I really understood the joy that went along with real love either.
I think- through Scripture, and increasingly through experience... that this is the better way. I think all of us at all involved in conservative Christianity would do very well to let these verses hang over everything they think of as progress in the faith.
But now I want to lay out a far better way for you.
1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.
...
13But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Cor 13
Please don't gloss over the last verse without thinking about what it means practically.
