LOVE : Advent Week 2

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.” - CS Lewis

Family is one of the most multi-faceted places in where love is seen and proclaimed. We celebrate anniversaries. We post about the love we hold for our kids. We have a sibling that we love. We love our parents and grandparents for all they have done. The list goes on.

Within our home and among our family members, we can see how the greatest lessons of love both play out.

Like, the tenderness of a mother and father who cares for an infant continues on as they tirelessly teach and train the same as a teen…for the sake their ultimately well-being.

This particular good-and-difficult relationship I’m living currently is a place where I can more clearly see the self-sacrificial love example. I don’t love my teen and pour out my time and teaching for my sake. No, I do it to see the ultimate best for my teen because I love him.

We see this reflected because of God’s imprint of His image on us: God loves us as the perfect Father in heaven, pointing us to where we get our ultimate best as he cares for our infant-to-adulthood souls.

We, like teens, can too be difficult to love.

But what about beyond the nuclear family model? Is this love specifically commanded and reflected into the nuclear family only?

For it says simply, we love because He first loved us. (1 John 4:19)

He gave us everything when we could give Him no thing. And not even that our hands were full of nothing but rather full of rags and swearing and blasphemy and mud.

But we know Christ can do amazing things with mud.

We are gathering soon for Christmas and there are people we might be facing soon that are hard. Painful jests. Comments that make us defensive. Disagreements, oh, the disagreements. In fact, we hope something happens where we must cancel. But…

There’s mud in their hands, too, and their rags have yet to be cleansed. So how can we expect any different?

This is where the very imprint of our Father in heaven can reflect the light and kindness of steadfast, regardless-of-what-you-give-me love.

Be kind. Be love. For their ultimate good, too.