and the greatest is love

Today I've been trying to recalibrate. To be more accurate, I am trying to figure out how God wants me to set my sights to begin with.

I am saddened by the fact that after being in and around the church and its people for 28 years, I feel no closer to the ideal that Jesus represents. I have literally put up my hands, reaching towards Heaven for a connection...I have sat in silence in attempt to "be still and know"...I have fruitlessly read and re-read the same familiar passages of my Bible...

I ask God and others: "What am I missing? What am I not doing? What is it going to take?" These questions asked in response to my daily sin and to my feeling of general disconnection to the God I pray to.

The answer God seems to be pointing me back to relates to love. Consider the words God showed me today:

In my Sunday School lesson, the writer is relating God's greatest commands ("to love the Lord your God with all your heart...[and] Love your neighbor as yourself"). He explains: "While liking a person is primarily an emotional response, loving a person is a choice we make--a choice to treat him or her as Jesus treats us."

In Rumors of An Invisible World, Yancey says that the most important qualities in a human are compassion, generosity, humility, and love (rather than the ones we praise most loudly: fame, success, wealth, health, etc...)

These words angle me back to view what God has tried to show me a hundred thousand times--LOVE. Love, pure and separated from emotion, first as an act of obedience and then developing into something more.

Our love for God and our love for those around us--this has to be the answer.

And again (for my benefit): Love is not a feeling.

God's word -- Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. (1 Corinthians 13:4-8)

And this not just for my wife? my kids? God, you want me to love like this for everybody? I mean, I consider myself giving and caring...but this Love?

I'm going to read and re-read that passage. It is comforting to know that God has given us all the capacity to love like this.

Now to get to it...