Outdo Each Other in Love

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers, welcome back and thank you as always for your interest and support.

We have been encouraged this week in time with family, over lunch with some very special friends who always bless us with their presence, and positive cognitive homework outcomes for Joy which helped boost her spirits. In our reality now of cognitive progress being measured in fractions of an inch, when previously gains seemed to come by the mile, it can be hard to keep perspective. But I/we are very thankful for the tools we have available that allow us to objectively measure tangible gains, even if they come at a snail’s pace. 🐌

Joy has been working diligently on her creative endeavors having completed multiple baby quilts, sweaters, hats, and booties and is anxious to drop off her stash and restock at Bundles of Love, now that their annual fundraising holiday bazaar is over. And, as I am sure everyone else is doing, we are looking forward to the holidays and ironing out plans, details, and schedules for the days and weeks ahead.

I guess this week has been a “normal” week, in the reality of our “new normal.” It held its challenges but also some very real blessings and sweet times together. One of the things I most appreciate is when Joy shares and explores with me her take on what we’ve been reading in our read-through-the-Bible this year. While both Joy and I hold Master’s Degrees from Bethel Theological Seminary, the accident stripped away much of Joy’s memory of her formal education in medicine, counseling, and theology. But that does not mean that she has lost her ability to think deeply, to painstakingly sift through the confusing tangle of damaged neurons struggling to re-wire themselves in a new way of understanding. Joy’s tenacity and determination to pursue her Abba, Father God, in confident trust and her passion to use all that she is, and all that she has, to bless others while bringing glory to God, inspires me and humbles me beyond words.

Joy’s intimate love for God and love for others is characterized so well in one of our favorite passages we read this week from Hebrews 10:

And so, dear brothers and sisters, now we may walk right into the very Holy of Holies, where God is, because of the blood of Jesus. This is the fresh, new, life-giving way that Christ has opened up for us by tearing the curtain—to let us into the holy presence of God. And since this great High Priest of ours rules over God’s household, let us go right in to God himself, with true hearts fully trusting him to receive us because we have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean and because our bodies have been washed with pure water. Now we can look forward to the salvation God has promised us. There is no longer any room for doubt, and we can tell others that salvation is ours, for there is no question that he will do what he says. In response to all he has done for us, let us outdo each other in being helpful and kind to each other and in doing good.

Brennan Manning captures this call of applying the intimacy with our Abba Father God to being helpful and kind to others in his book “Abba’s Child” when he writes:

My identity as Abba’s child is not an abstraction or a tap dance into religiosity. It is the core truth of my existence. Living in the wisdom of accepted tenderness profoundly affects my perception of reality, the way I respond to people and their life situations. How I treat my brothers and sisters from day to day, whether they be Caucasian, African, Asian, or Hispanic; how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street; how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike; how I deal with ordinary people in their ordinary unbelief on an ordinary day, will speak the truth of who I am more poignantly than a pro-life sticker on the bumper of a car. We are not for life simply because we are warding off death. We are sons and daughters of the Most High and maturing in tenderness to the extent that we are for others—all others—to the extent that no human flesh is strange to us, to the extent that we can touch the hand of another in love, to the extent that for us there are no “others.”

At a time when our world is so characterized by division, anger, and strife, it is good to be reminded, to be exhorted, that we are to, “outdo each other in being helpful and kind to each other and in doing good.”