Being the Beloved - A Monthly Blog from CFDM Northwest
By Rev. Terry Tripp, Co-Director CFDM NW
Ah, February, the month we celebrate love. Valentine’s Day comes with so many expectations. Or maybe none, if we are protecting ourselves from disappointment or a rejection of a “manmade artifice”. It may even come with no thought of it at all, until we walk into a store showering us with ploys to buy hearts filled with chocolate or the perfect card professing our love. Or during a pandemic, the on-line site inviting us to buy, buy, buy; so that our loved one feels loved.
But is this how we are meant to love? Of course not. Love is hard. Being human is hard. We need divine love to flow through us if we are to love as the Apostle Paul proclaims. From the Message, I Corinthians 13.
“If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but do not love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, ‘Jump,’ and it jumps, but I do not love, I am nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I do not love, I have gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I am bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love does not want what it does not have. Love does not strut. Does not have a swelled head, does not force itself on others, is not always ‘me first’, does not fly off the handle, does not keep score of the sins of others, does not revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end. …. (read on it’s good) And the chapter ends with, “Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.”
After January in our Nation and in our collective memory of what it means to conduct ourselves as a people of faith, hope, and love, let us renew our resolve to ask God to remake us in God’s image. Renew our capacity to clarity of vision for the sake of others and love the least of them. Let us by grace step into our lives with restraint of self-absorption, asking God to fill us with love for our broken selves steeped in need of the Spirit’s work in us. Let us pray together to love as God loves us and (do you hear it?) ‘Let the world be as one’… Ok, you are not a Beatles fan, but come on, it had some good lines! Pray for love. It starts with your own inner self, aware of your need of God to do in you that which you cannot do for yourself. Ask and you shall receive.
It is not too early to share the opportunity that CFDM has for those who want to begin that journey of knowing they are the beloved of God. For more information see our website at cfdmnorthwest.org.
What books, media, activities are nurturing your heart, soul, mind, strength in this season as we are loving God and our neighbor as ourselves? Post in the comments below or hop on over to our Facebook page and share with one another.