Love

1 John 3:16-24

Sometimes, loving other people can be one of the hardest things God asks us to do.

It can be easy to forget this simple but demanding commandment when the person we are called to love is a person who says hateful words to us or about us. Or a person who holds and publically proclaims values we think are hateful. Or when the person we are called to love is someone who has hurt us deeply.

These days it seems like it is easier to hate people we find hard to understand, rather than to love them. Compassion and seeing things from a different perspective than our own takes a lot of mental and emotional work, doesn’t it?

When I wonder why this is the case, why our collective hearts seem weaker than is necessary for us to have more patience and compassion, I find myself considering a few stark realities: we are experiencing a loneliness epidemic, circumstances related to war, climate change, and political dysfunction contributes to collective anxiety, poverty is still on the rise and encountering it day in and day out is overwhelming—to say nothing of how overwhelming it is to experience it.

I am sure you could think of additional reasons why our hearts might be “condemning us” (to use the words in 1 John), and failing to love our neighbor.

The author of 1 John in the passage I am reflecting on this week is focused on love. “We know love by this, that [Jesus] laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers and sisters.” (1 John 3:16)

It can be easy to keep our understanding of love at an emotional level. Love is something we feel for someone else. Maybe it’s how we feel about a family member. Or a close friend. Or our spouse. But in the writing of 1 John, we also can recognize Love as a verb. “Little children, let us love not in word or speech but in deed and in truth.”

When we are having a hard time “feeling” love, maybe we can do something instead. Maybe there is a good deed for a stranger we can commit. Or volunteer hours we can spare. We can donate to organizations that are helping our neighbors who are struggling. We could even choose to smile at a stranger passing us by, not because we need to know them or even like them—but because seeing another person smile can cause your brain to release feel-good hormones. You can help someone feel slightly better just by smiling at them as you pass them by!

I think there are a lot of ways to Love one another even if we might not like one another. Or we can love a stranger we might never meet.

And we can live into that love “in deed and truth.” And the great thing is that once we change our perspective on love in this way, we can experience God abiding in us! “All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them.”

The greatest commandment from God, reaffirmed in the teachings of Jesus Christ, is to Love. Love God and Love neighbor. I think we can pull that off.