Your calling is to fulfil the royal law of love as given to us in this Scripture: “You must love and value your neighbor as you love and value yourself!” For keeping this law is the noble way to live.
To Love – Part 5
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4
The royal law of love.
That’s our calling.
Love is a tough gig. Brené Brown (I know we keep quoting her, but she is the BEST on this stuff.) says,
“To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn’t come with guarantees – these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. But, I’m learning that recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude and grace.”
In our circles of faith, we go on and on and on about vocation and calling and purpose and the timing of God and his providence and leading and destiny… when, right now, no matter where you are, who are you, and what you do and do not have, we can engage in the highest call there is: love.
It's not an action, or a switch you flip, or line you cross, or a check box on a list. We don't just ‘love others,’ we have to love ourselves too; allow love to flow into us, through us and out of us. It’s fluid. It's not something we put on and take off, but something we dive into and become a part of.
It's risky. Our hearts can be broken, we can see things and experience things and get close to people and circumstances that could rip the life right out of us… but what's the alternative?
We can hide our hearts away and keep them all to ourselves. Cast our judgement, put up a good front, be the picture of perfection, but without love our hearts become brittle and empty. Tennyson wrote, “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” To reject love is to reject the divine and the infinite; to choose to stay blind and deaf and unmoving to the heart and origin of all creation.
We can’t truly love others until we learn to love ourselves It’s the judgement we place on our lack of perfection and our inability to measure up, that causes us to lash out in judgement of others. If we truly understood that we are loved by God and that we have permission to love ourselves and others, then we wouldn’t feel the need or impulse to judge. We would have eyes to see and ears to hear the stories and the hearts behind all the stuff that we, in our brokenness, normally can't see beyond.
We hide away in our homes, hoping no one sees the mess, while we post status updates and photos about how some people are wrong and we’re better… when all the while, if we just lived openly, we’d see that we are all the same. Broken yet loved, weak yet empowered, shattered yet redeemed, unique but divinely connected.
In God's Kingdom, to be royal is to be someone fluid in love. Receiving, accepting and giving. To be loved, to love yourself and to love others.
One more from the queen Brené,
“Of this, I am actually certain. After collecting thousands of stories, I’m willing to call this a fact: A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all women, men, and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.”
To accept love and to love could perhaps be the most royal and courageous thing we will ever do.
Go to Part 6 – To Be Loved
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