One of the things we explore in great detail is the development of religion as part of the human story.  Tracy wrote the following piece that shares some of the differences between religion and love.

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I was talking with some friends today and they were, in part, recounting what religion has to done people. As I heard the horrors recounted (I will not share them here; you likely already know them all too well), I realize how bastardized what should be good news has become in the religious system of our day.

Rather than proclaim with great boldness: “You are loved. Relax. Go have a bottle of wine with some friends and strangers. Celebrate the uniqueness of both the One who loves you and of yourself! Invite me to eat with you and we can talk and get to know each other,” religion says, “Serve, be good, do the right thing, keep working hard, strive for purity, obey, submit, follow external instructions, and no matter what, conform so that you look just like us.”

Religion says: Celebrate the same way we do, with decency and order, and be sure you stay in line. Be careful who you hang out with—you don’t want a bad influence rubbing off on you. Appearances are everything, so choose carefully.

Love says: Let’s celebrate! Go wild, tip over the edge! Tell everyone they are welcome to my party! Be expansive, wildly open, stupidly generous, and ridiculously joyous. Invite the oddest people you can find—please! Shower one another with openness and love and being authentic. What great gifts you have for each other! Give them indiscriminately.

Religion says: Weigh your options. Try to be sure you’re on the right path. Be cautious so you don’t get out of the will of God.

Love says: Throw caution to the wind. Be the wild self you were created to be, filled with passion and ready to make lots of mistakes. No need to fear; I have it all covered!

Religion says: Do this. Don’t do that. If you do this, I will bless you. If you don’t do this, I will not bless you.

Love says: You don’t need to change a thing for me. You could never disappoint me. My love encompasses all you do. I have thrown away the measuring stick for all time!

Religion says: It’s safe to come out! We want to beat you over the head when you do and tell you how totally unacceptable you are for daring to think differently than we do. Heretic!

Love says: It’s safe to come out! You can be your authentic self, in all your glorious messiness. I see all of your BS anyway, so why bother hiding it? I am love and I embrace you completely.

And, perhaps, the worst contrast of all:

Religion says: Keep on trying. One more altar call. One more prayer. One more donation. One more effort. Try just a little bit harder. You can be “fixed” if you focus more on yourself.

Love says: It is finished! All that’s left is the celebration! Enter into what I’ve done. Let’s have the most passionate, electrifying, fun, wild rollercoaster ride together!

If it doesn’t sound absolutely too good to be true, then you haven’t heard the true message of Love. I can only think that people who still walk in religious ways have simply not met the One who is Love.

Your thoughts?

I often wrestle with the idea of evangelism.  Is it a conversation, a lifestyle, a message, a story, or all of the above?  My desire in exploring the concept is simply to connect in some ways with people’s hearts.

And over time I have come to understand that what draws the heart in like no other is the simple question, “Are you interested in being loved?”  So much of the journey in following Jesus begins not with practicing love, but in practicing being loved. Because it is when we embrace love that we can then love.

Are we willing to tear down the obstacles we’ve created to engage relationship with the one who created us?  Are we willing to explore our own brokenness in the face of a God who could condemn us but instead chose to restore us?  Are we willing to let go of our brokenness which is a terrible story to live in and discover the life that Jesus offers, one defined by love and trust?

The choice is up to you?

What is a Father?  We ask this question, don’t we?

One of the central relationships we deal with in Thrive groups is our relationship with a “Father”.  For many this is a troublesome, even loaded word.  It may include ignorance, rejection, and even abuse.  We suffer the unintended consequences of another person’s brokenness.  We arrive with a story about a relationship with a man who didn’t always know what he was doing. The smoldering sting of our father’s words haunt us in ways we can’t understand.

We simply long to hear the words, “You are worth it,” or “I love you.”

And to make matters worse, many of us are struggling with what it means to be a father.  The story we have about what it means is often something we don’t know how to deal with.  So we passively reject the story we’ve been given by our Father, one that includes rejection itself.  And in it’s absence we try and figure it out on our own, drowning at times under our own fear of failure. We know what the consequences are.  We’ve lived them.

But this rejection of our own story has a way of continuously perpetuating itself.  A father’s inability to understand what to do is often interpreted as something more than it is.  What the child hears is what we heard.  “You are not worth it.”  And as a four year old child, how would we know that our father was scared to death, trembling at the weight of what it means to parent another soul.  How would we know that the silence was a frozen confusion, perpetuating itself into an angry fear.

Little do we know that the loss we feel is the same loss our Father’s felt from their fathers.  The story has a way of repeating itself, over and over and over again. This is the father wound.

What is profound about the narrative in Scripture is that God identifies Himself as Father.  He actively seeks out a relationship, once that calls us to restoration, wholeness and maturity.  And as followers of Jesus, we are first called to restore this relationship, with our Heavenly Father.  This journey is often fraught with fear, and can include a step into and through the pain of this wound.  But it is this first relationship with the Father that validates us, loves us and restores us.

Two thirds of Scripture is God actively seeking out His children.  And the pinnacle of the story is God the Father actively revealing Himself through His Son Jesus, the Imago Dei.  And the more we get to know Jesus, the more we begin to realize that He’s not like what we’re used to.  He’s longs to spend time with us, restore us to wholeness, and see us mature.  His love for us reveals that we are worth it.

So rewriting our story becomes the journey.  Seeing this love in our tribe becomes the chapters.  And embracing His love becomes our salvation.

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.