Love costs

Poatina Morning Tea Devotion given yesterday

A Community of love

I am continuing a series of devotions on a verse that was one of the first to stand out to me around the question, “How do I survive,  hanging it together in leadership?”

“Don’t let anyone put you down because you’re young. Teach believers with your life: by word, by demeanour, by love, by faith, by integrity.”  Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young but set an example for the believers.” (1 Timothy 4:12)

I hung onto it – even still, as I often  feel inadequate, I feel young.  But some laugh at that because to them I now look old.

I recently discovered the 2^nd part of the verse where Paul lists the ways Timothy is to set an example.  If you want to influence the church positively these are the things to focus on.

The first is, the way he talks.  Then,  he says, “With your life”…the whole of your life.  Then, “Set an example in Love”.

It’s all very well to say that I love, but it’s something else for people to be able to say, yes, I can see that he is a loving person. In her Nobel prize acceptance speech in 1979, Mother Theresa said:

“It is not enough for us to say: “I love God, but I do not love my neighbor.” Saint John says that you are a liar if you love God and you don’t love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? And so this is very important for us to realize, that love, to be true, has to hurt”

Mother Theresa was a  little lady who had one spare set of clothes and  every morning breakfast was just a banana and a cup of coffee… she lived simply but she loved.

How do you feel when you know you’re loved…?

“I expand”.  “Feel cared for”; “Secure”. “More of me can exist”.

It’s like an aperture gets bigger.  “Takes less energy in your relationship.”  To love isn’t always easy though, is it?

Love is what we are called to.

This week in Advanced Diploma we are studying a new book, “Community and Growth”,  by Jean Vanier.   He wrote this book when his community was at the same stage that Poatina is now. He started communities in 1964…and it’s about the practicalities of what made the communities work.

Early in Vanier’s  book he says:

I am more and more struck by people who are dissatisfied…when they are in big communities they want small and when they are in small, they want big.  Don’t we all dream of the perfect community?  It is difficult to get people to understand that the ideal doesn’t exist.   It may come, only in flashes of grace and peace. If we are looking too much for our own peace, we will never find it.  It is the fruit of love and service to others.  I’d like to tell those people, stop looking for peace,  look instead at your brothers and sisters in need – work with the situation as it is. Ask how you can better love and then you will find peace.  The balance that we seek is resolved through love.  Stop wasting time looking for the perfect community. Stop seeing flaws and thank God there are some.  Look instead at your own defects.  Enter into the conversion of love, and pray always.

It is a practical book – he doesn’t make community sound like loads of fun all the time.

If you want to find a way of getting the balance right, stop thinking about the balance, start thinking about the people all around us.  The sign as you enter the village says, “The way life was meant to be”.  If we ever get to the point where we say, “Yes, this is it!”,  I think we’re in trouble.   If you look around it’ll take you 30 seconds to find things that aren’t the way life was meant to be.  But this is what we’re reaching for…our dream is to be a model of our community’s care for young people.

There are no rules that make community work.  I am concluding, more and more, that it is what I do when I walk out this door that matters.  It’s the conversation I have with someone now.  It is not about the best structure.

Am I going to love you or not? Am I going to love you because I love Jesus – or because I’m trying really hard?

I think this might be one of the verses that Mother Theresa was referring to:

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.  If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.… (1 John 3:16-18 )

This is the Biblical basis of what Vanier is saying.  If the place of peace is what you’re looking for, you’ll never find it.  It is a journey.  And it is a difficult and messy journey, because I’m difficult and messy, and I think I can say, so are you.

But we’re on the journey together.  As I walk out the doors today to stop and think about someone other than myself, it’s about willing to love; willing to do the work to love. If enough of us can make the choices, then we can be a community.