Loving as you know how

True confessions. My great fear in life is that I do not love people. This is not self-deprecation but a clear-eyed self-evaluation buttressed by a track record and bitter fruit. The current drama in my life has led me to pray that God would pour His love into my heart—like a fire hose. But what do I do in the meantime while I am waiting for God to answer that prayer? That is the question. After all, who can change his own heart, right?

Now I got a letter out of the blue from a prison inmate, in which he happened to mention the following verses:

“Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia. But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more …” (1 Thessalonians 4:9–10, ESV).

God used the correspondence to answer my question: The ability to love is not something out of my reach. As the Apostle Paul quotes from Deuteronomy in another passage about faith:

“… The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (Romans 10:8, ESV).

That is, there is plenty that God puts into our hands and expects us to go out and do immediately. We are to go out this very day and love people, “for that indeed is what you are doing [already],” says Paul. We are not to say to ourselves, “Who will ascend into heaven?” (Romans 10:6, ESV), as if God’s commands are elusive and unreachable. We are not to say to ourselves, “I have to wait around till God is good and ready to give me more love, and if He will not I am in despair.” Rather, we are to go out and do it. Love now. Love in all the ordinary ways that ordinary people already know how to show love to one another. Put on kindness. Put on patience, humility, considerateness. And as we do these doable things, God will increase our love.

This is a great relief to me. I am not the one person in the world that Paul’s command to love is impossible for. If God’s answer to my prayer is to go ahead and love as He has taught me, I’m all over it.

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