Love, Friendship, and Loving Others

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers. Fall is in the air and a few of the trees have already started to turn hues of yellow, orange, and red. Fall has always been my favorite season and I reflect back to last year as Joy was doing well in her recovery and we were enjoying fall walks made all the more special knowing we could still share them together.

This week brought a couple of different new social situations for us and Joy absolutely excelled in each, I am so very proud of her. She managed meeting new people and conversations like a pro, while it did lay her low for a couple of days after, we were still both pleased beyond words at how she was able to handle the experiences.

We also have attempted to return to a more structured homework schedule for Joy. Since we discovered all Joy could do for Bundles of Love with her knitting, crocheting, and sewing, I’ve kind of let her knit, crochet, and sew to her heart’s content. But we both agreed that despite the pleasure she finds in her craft, it does not necessarily help her aphasia and cognitive processing. So, it’s back to her aphasia app and other resources for practice, practice, and more practice.

In the past week we had the opportunity to spend time with a treasured life-long friend. The kind of friend you may not see for months or even years at a time and yet when you come together, it's like you were never separated. This special friend encouraged us and blessed us immeasurably with their energy, love, and compassion.

Love comes easy in friendships like that, but in the world as divided as our’s is presently, even among people who “thought they were friends,” it becomes much more challenging to follow Jesus’ command to, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The daily hostility of our time is heartbreaking and I must admit, weighs on and grieves my soul. But then, just in time for this post, I came across a Frederick Buechner observation on none other than this very topic. And so, despite it’s length, I want to share it because it seems so relevant to our time and needs. I hope it can encourage you as it encouraged me, Buechner writes:

The first stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love. The middle stage is to believe that there are many kinds of love and that the Greeks had a different word for each of them. The last stage is to believe that there is only one kind of love.

The unabashed eros of lovers, the sympathetic philia of friends, agape giving itself away freely no less for the murderer than for his victim (the King James version translates it as charity)—these are all varied manifestations of a single reality. To lose yourself in another’s arms, or in another’s company, or in suffering for all men who suffer, including the ones who inflict suffering upon you—to lose yourself in such ways is to find yourself. Is what it’s all about. Is what love is.

Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.

To say that love is God is romantic idealism. To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our own well-being to that end, even if it means sometimes just leaving them alone. Thus in Jesus’ terms we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.

When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn’t say, “There, there. Everything’s going to be all right.” He said, “You brood of vipers! how can you speak good when you are evil!” (Matthew 12:34). And he said that to them because he loved them.

This does not mean that liking may not be a part of loving, only that it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes liking follows on the heels of loving. It is hard to work for somebody’s well-being very long without coming in the end to rather like him too.

And so, may love, in whatever form and whoever for, be our goal this week and always.