Love Looks Like Getting Up in the Middle of the Night

It was around 4 am a few nights ago and I heard my phone vibrate. Being unable to sleep, I figured I’d read the message.

Turns out a friend of mine with small children was awake because one of their children had a nightmare. The dream woke them, they came to get their parents, and this parent went to cuddle with the child on the couch so that they could go back to sleep.

As my friend and I were texting back and forth there was no complaining on their end. Merely facts about why they were awake.

I was struck by the sacrificial act of love.

That’s what we do when we love people, right? We make sacrifices. Isn’t that one of the most powerful lessons in the cross?

Absolute sacrificial love.

Author and speaker Simon Sinek gives a beautiful definition of the word “love.”

“Love is giving someone the power to destroy you, knowing they won’t use it.”

Sunday we talked about how to navigate our way forward as a nation divided politically, still amidst a pandemic.

We believe, as followers of The Way, it all boils down to love.

Loving all people. Not just our closest circles, but all people. Even those . . . maybe especially those we disagree with. We are called to love not with our own love, but with Divine love.

From Richard Rohr,

“Divine love or charity has nothing to do with feelings of “liking” one another. One key biblical word for love, agape, is not based on the myth of romantic love or good feelings about one another. It is a love grounded in God that allows us to honestly desire and seek the other’s spiritual growth. This faith, this love, this Holy Mystery—of which we are only a small part—can only be awakened and absorbed by the silent gaze of prayer. Those who contemplate who they are in God’s ecstatic love will be transformed as they look and listen and find and share. This God, like a Seductress, does not allow Herself to be known apart from love. We know God by loving God. And I think that it is actually more important to know that we love God than to know that God loves us, although the two movements are finally the same.”