I was thinking about love tonight as I was writing message outlines.
I started thinking about the tensions kids live with and the way their brains are wired to grow, to believe and to doubt. The way their minds shift between the call of their hearts and the reasoning forming in their heads. There’s so much to wonder. The older I get the more I realize that the wonder is so much better than knowing it all. But it can be confusing when youre 12, 15, 19, 22. Growing up isn’t easy. It can feel like a departure from love–the experiences, the anxieties, the questions, the fears. But love meets them just as it meets you and me.
There’s a poem about the types of things love can do. I am really only beginning to wrestle with the ideas.
But the quick explanation is that love works for us in the tension.
The language of the poem is from another time. But it’s message is timeless.
Love takes the things that shouldn’t be out of things that were meant to be.
Love does stuff in the middle places. In the situations when words, definitions, and people fail us. Love makes things different. Love transforms. Love is our helper and covering. After all, without it, the giving of Jesus may not have been. (John 3:16)
Mildred Bangs Wynkoop (A Theology of Love)
Love takes the Harshness out of Holiness
Love takes the Incredibility out of Perfection
Love takes Antinomianism out of Faith
Love takes Moralism out of Obedience
Love takes Gnosticism out of Cleansing
Love takes Abstraction out of Truth
Love puts the Personal into Truth
Love puts Ethical into Holiness
Love puts Process into Life
Love puts Urgency into Crisis
Love puts Seriousness into Sin
Love puts Fellowship into Perfection
Where does love meet you?
Where does love work in the tension of your life?
How does it change what you do? What you say?
How does it free you?
1 Peter 4:8
(Photo: Friends from Challenge Conference KC)
