24 Aug 05 Love Unconditionally

24 Aug 05 Love Unconditionally, but….

I don’t digest this thought real easy. I can chew on it, taste it, swallow it and then it just kind of sits there and sours. Like a rebellious child with selective listening…I suffer with selective loving. I don’t battle with loving a perfect, good, awesome, Holy, omni-everything God. I’ve settled that issue in my heart a long time ago. I suppose to a certain extent, to love Him according to His commands is to love my neighbor. So I can’t even love God perfectly. His already born-again and His pre-born again people find ways to stick in my craw. They can be hallelujah friendly one minute and unwittingly condemning the next. I love you sister with the love of Christ in an instant and away with you I know you not, the next. I am perplexed about those that He loves and that He commands me to do the same. I have little patience with the body of Christ and realize how totally sacrilegious this sounds. I know the mystery of it all is glorifying to God and I know that love is not an emotion, but a commitment…but I don’t get it. It would be so simple to live and develop shiny surface relationships where the biggest investment would be a sermon Sunday hug or smile. It would lessen the connectors in the matrix, if I didn’t extend my heart, my finances and time. I could revert to Brother Lawrence living, vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning, with the meditation of God upon my thoughts and motivations but the fly in the ointment and the obvious elephant in the room is that is not in any semblance of how He created me. I tend to be more social, than the social butterfly. I’m attracted to swarms and my light seems to be fueled by the presence of others. God created me a loving, caring, busy body that gets into people’s faces and never settles for the “I’m fine.” Response to “How are you?” When my children were little they would with complete confidence tell me about a special dessert sac that could not be filled with salads nor meats, only desserts. So where it was impossible to put another fork of mashed potatoes in their bellies, there was always room for pie, ice cream or cake. The meal was incomplete unless the dessert sac had been sated. In His designing me, He created a people sac in my soul and this life will never be complete until it is filled with people. All flavors of people, rich, poor, young, old, boys, girls, women, men, babies, colorful…so delightful, so yummy and without this filling my soul would be incomplete. As any dietician would tell you too much dessert would cause a variety of health problems…so would investing into too many lives. There is room for just enough people.