Thursday = Thirsty: Episode 3 – Loving God means loving him/her/them.

The blogosphere has been going quite crazy recently with a whole lot of posts relating to the homosexuality and marriage questions being raised across the United States as various parts of government have been dealing with various scenarios. There has been a fair amount of rape-related posting with the whole #safetytipsforladies hashtag that came out satirising the ridiculous advice given to women to ‘help them to avoid being raped’ and thus helping create or re-emphasise a rape culture that blames the victim. A decent amount of writing has been happening around the issue of gun violence and gun control following on from a spate of school shootings that have occurred in recent years. And then of course we had the tragedy of Dallas and Kay Willard losing a son to suicide and the hoax resignation of Joel Osteen from the ministry and turning away from Christianity which filled up their fair share of column space.

It’s Thursday which means ‘Thirsty’ on ‘The Weekly Mash [and peace!]’ and so we’re supposed to be looking at something relating to God. Well, before you wander away from this blog because you think it is yesterday’s post because of the same cartoon peering out of it, then WAIT! I decided to do something a little differently today, because the message of yesterday’s cartoon felt very much like a relationship thing [which is why I used it yesterday] but looking at it in the context of my introduction made me realise strongly that it is very much a today thing as well.

In John 13, just after humbling Himself completely and washing the stench and grime and dirt of His disciples’ feet, Jesus looks at them with great compassion and says this, ‘“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”'[verse 34-35]

This was also the greatest commandment Jesus gave when asked to in Matthew 22. Love God, love people [including your neighbors and your enemies, oh and those in the church too maybe]. Yet when I have read through so many posts by people calling themselves ‘christian’ in all of those different categories above, my heart has been saddened and broken, time and time again, by seeing the complete lack of Love that is shown the moment someone has a different opinion or reads and interprets the Bible differently or challenges their views on some issue or belief.

Jesus never said we had to agree with everyone. But we do have to Love them. There is no getting around that. It should never even be a question.

To put it a different way, Love is caring for each other even when you are angry.

I once wrote a book titled, ‘If your Christianity is easy, you’re doing it wrong.’
I’m thinking the follow-up could quite well be called, ‘If you are not being Loving to those around you, you’re doing it wrong.

The sad thing is that the people needing to read this are too busy writing out their hate signs, or trolling blog comment sections looking for fights, or posting another ‘God hates…’ manifesto… but maybe you can be a little sneaky and print this out and stick it under their door or cut and paste it and drop it to them in an email or inadvertently share this link on their wall or twitter feed… [you might want to cut this last part out if you are actually going to stick it under someone’s door or they might suspect!]

[for next Thursday’s How’s Your Heart, click here]
[for last Thursday’s Ask or Imagine Bigger, click here]