A New Kind of Life
accessed by doing something counterintuitive
Love is hard. I’m not talking about the feeling of love. I’m talking about the action. I’m talking deep, authentic love. I’m talking about an unselfish commitment to the well-being of another person. That’s hard. It’s wonderful, too, for sure. It can be easy and simple for a season, but it’s almost never that way for long. Before too long, when we love another person deeply, things will inevitably get messy and difficult.
Loving a spouse over the decades is hard. Loving a friend through a difficult time is hard. Loving co-workers, bosses, employees is hard. Loving all our neighbors is hard.
As I have mentioned before, Jennifer and I are entering a new season of empty-nesting. We are experiencing newfound freedom. With all three kiddos off at college — the closest being more than 2000 miles away — we now get to say yes to family and friends a lot more. We get to spend more time with people we love but have been loving with less intensity and availability due to 23 years of up-close parental duties. We’re only a few months in, but I’ve been struck by how sweet and rich these times are but also by how complicated. I’ve been struck by how, anytime you lean into authentic love, you encounter more of what C. S. Lewis termed “frets and rubs.”
And I think that might be the whole point. Or much of it, at least.
One difference between heaven and earth is love. We take it less seriously than God does. There’s so much we don’t know about him. He’s infinite and infinitely mysterious. But we do know this: love is at the core of everything God is and everything he does.
“Love is from God,” wrote the apostle John (1 John 4:7). But, going even further, he also wrote, “God is love [emphasis added]” (1 John 4:8). He personifies it. You see, while God is a person unto himself, he’s also actually, as Dallas Willard wrote, “a sweet society of Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” His very nature is that of a community of love — a corps of three who bestow unsparingly upon one another a deep and never-ending love.
God’s kind of love is the communal kind. The mutual kind. It demands another. In his kind of love, someone loves someone else. God loves Jesus. God loves the Holy Spirit. They both love him back (and each other). But that’s not all. God also created beings — people — outside this tight community of three. Lots of anothers. And because God loves us, you and me, “in the same way” that he loves Jesus, he invites us, too, into his sweet society (John 17:23). He invites us to participate in his community of boundless love. He invites us into his family.
But even that’s not all. When we come into God’s family, and into his familial love, he helps us to participate as family members. He fills us with his love and empowers us to love others. He pours love into each of us so that we can experience and enjoy it, for sure, but also so that it overflows. So that we, in turn, can love him back, and so that we can love other people too — other anothers. He offers us all way more love than we can handle so we can have plenty of love to give away.
His intention, his dream, is that this family of love grows and grows. It’s his great desire that all of his sons and daughters love each other just like he does. “A new commandment I give to you,” Jesus said, “that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:34). Nothing else in the world matters to him as much. Love, therefore, is our number one priority. “Above all,” wrote Peter, “keep loving one another earnestly” (1 Pet. 4:8). “Let all that you do be done in love,” added Paul (1 Cor. 16:14).
When all the blare and babble of our world recedes, we discover that these lives of ours are really about one thing: love. Our every moment. Every decision. Every action. Every interaction. Everything about our existence. All of it — somehow, someway — is about love.
But, again, love is hard … because God seems to enjoy bringing us into relationships with bothersome and broken people, unexpected people with eccentric quirks, because those kinds of people are precisely the ones that can help us become less broken ourselves. We’re sure to like some of the people he brings into our orbits, of course. Very much. But others, inevitably, we’ll like less so. They’ll have different ways of doing things, different senses of humor, different politics. They’ll annoy and provoke and might even wound us — and we’re sure to do the same to them.
But, counterintuitively, Lewis’s “frets and rubs” aren’t as bad as we think. In fact, they’re actually beneficial. The differences and difficulties, the things we’d like to fix in our spouses and family members and friends and colleagues and neighbors, are often the very things God uses to expose where we’re wounded and need healing. And vice versa. Being in close proximity to each other brings our limitations, insecurities, biases, jealousies, and even our cruelties into sharp focus. Relationships offer unique opportunities to confront these things in ourselves. To overcome them. To heal.
And as we heal, we inevitably realize that we aren’t as different as we think, that we actually share many or most of the same fears and struggles. We realize that we’re all in this thing together. That we are, all of us, in desperate need of healing. And as we heal and mature, we become, as Eberhard Arnold wrote, “reconciled to people’s imperfection.” Reconciled even to our own. And then, finally, we begin to get a whole lot better at being kind and loving toward other people and ourselves — and that opens up to us an entirely new kind of life.
Kathryn Post wrote “The Practice of Forgiveness.”
Nicole Unice (Rapt alum) wrote “Choosing Humility.”
The Jesus Project folks wrote “Learning to Serve Like Jesus.”
Sample ➼ “Messy Beautiful Friendship” (women) by Christine Hoover
Sample ➼ “Rescue” (men) by Justin Camp
Sample ➼ “Love Does” by Bob Goff
We updated Rapt’s ‘Best of’ lists this week. Lots of new stuff!
You are not alone if you have ever longed to share your faith with someone but found fear holding you back. Many of us long to people in our communities who God is and what he has done for us, but feel inadequate, awkward, and afraid of accidentally offending. In his new book “In Lit Up with Love,” Rapt alum Derwin Gray provides a guide for sharing the Gospel with authenticity and love.
Reward Sibanda is a speaker, writer, pastor at Saddleback Church and the Senior Director of National Church Engagement at World Vision.
Amanda Hayhurst is the author of a recently published devotional. Her writing has also been featured in Guidepost and Focus on the Family.
Willa Kane is an author, a Bible teacher, a trustee for the American Anglican Council and a founding member of Holy Trinity Anglican Church.
Sally Breedlove is an author, spiritual director, retreat leader, cofounder of JourneyMates and the associate director of Selah-Anglican.
P.S. Who should we interview next? Click here to let us know. And what new question would you like us to ask them? Click here to submit your suggestion.
“The kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice and presence. It's a love that operates more like a sign language than being spoken outright.” —Bob Goff
Throughout your day today, imagine a circle, one with a 10-foot radius, with you at the center. Notice who comes into that circle. Friends, family, co-workers, neighbors. These people have been given to you — and you, to them. Treat them with care. Notice their needs — friendship, mercy, love, hope — and consider how you might help God to meet them. Move in and do something.
We’re in this together, my friend — and I am very grateful for that.
Editor-at-Large, Rapt Interviews & Loop for Women
Co-executive Director, Gather Ministries
P.S. Today’s letter was adapted from chapter five of one of my books for men: Rescue: When God’s Cavalry Arrives to Deliver You from Quiet Desperation.
It reminded me that real love isn’t sterile or sentimental. It’s inconvenient, unglamorous, and sometimes excruciating. But also — it’s the only thing that actually changes us. Not just the loving we give, but what it reveals about where we still need healing.
That idea of love as God’s classroom, not just His comfort — that’s staying with me.