Learning To Love Again

Sometimes the journey of following Jesus is doing the same thing over and over again.

About a year and a half ago I wrote what it means to learn to love.  This step into the footsteps of Jesus has been a deeply important part of my faith.  It has taken it out of the realm of what I call my chalkboard period of faith, or the time in my life when I simply talked about Jesus and into the playing field.

Each step forward towards living out love is a new step.  Being human means being in relationship.  It means interacting with people who can make me laugh but also make me cry.  With relationship means the potential for both joy and pain.  I am grateful for the joy.  As I learn to love I find myself being removed from a perpetual isolation that I can so easily be drawn into.  It is in the relationships that I see the face of my Father.

But I am also learning to be grateful for the pain.  As Tracy so aptly puts, “But it is the difficult people in my life that cause the most growth in me. It is in conflict and hard times that I grow the most in the truths and trust of God.”

Each moment that I encounter the difficult periods, my Father asks me, “Do you want to learn to love again?”  It is this consistent practice that renders something deep in my soul.  It chips away at my defense mechanisms I’ve carefully constructed over the years and replaces them with a renewed sense of wholeness.  And what is interesting is that after I step into love, I am always grateful for the sense of becoming, for the sense of relationship that has been renewed or restored.  The obstacle has been removed and is now behind me.

Each time I practice love, when I essentially surrender to what the Spirit wants to do in me, it gets easier.  Yes, there are moments that make me want to run or fight back with my best judo move, but in calmer times I don’t really want that.  I want to be love.  It just makes sense to me.