Charlie Brown once said, “I love humanity! It is people I can’t stand!”

Yet the costly love that Jesus embodies involves an intimate encounter with God’s fierce and holy love. It involves pouring out oneself for real people, sinners all, with all their real-life quirks, faults, smells, and flesh-and-blood sins.

It’s that harried young mother in the doctor’s waiting room or maybe in the next pew. Loving her as yourself means offering to watch her toddler while she feeds her baby. It’s that person in line at the bank who’s stumbling over the English language and struggling to understand deposits and withdrawals. Loving him means stepping out of line and helping him get it straight.

It’s the next-door neighbor struggling to keep his marriage together, your daughter who pushes your buttons every ten minutes, the husband scared of being laid off — these are the ones who desperately need the strong saving love, the compassion and mercy, the challenge and holiness and presence of Jesus.

In those moments, dare to risk being rebuffed or inconvenienced. Dare to look foolish and make mistakes. Dare to love God and that person, even if it wrings your heart with pain to do so.

It’s what we’ve been created, redeemed, and commanded to do. Hang your whole life on love, for the truth is, it’s God’s love, active in you. And his love will never fail.

Thanks to Cathy A. Ammlung for sharing.

“Dare to love God and that person, even if it wrings your heart with pain to do so.”  Think of a time when YOU went ahead and did this.

JESUS LOVES YOU, AND I’M TRYING!!

I am getting emails, calls and texts from people telling me how much they are enjoying A POEM A DAY TO PRAY 2025. Please check it out: https://treatsforthesoul.org/a-poem-a-day-to-pray/