Meditation #2: Love

"The fruit of the Spirit is love..."

If I rejoice at your demise, then I have given myself over to hate. If I don't care about your demise, or worse, don't even bother to notice, then I have given myself over to the more subtle trap of indifference. Both are equally grave. And both are overcome by love. Love is not simply passively not hating. In its fullness, loves comes alive as Paul said in patience, kindness, humility, honor, etc. (1 Corinthians 13).

At the root of love is perception -- to see, to understand, to know. Bigotry, discrimination and condemnation all begin to dissipate as we come to know the other. It is awfully hard to hate someone or remain indifferent to them after hearing their story. When we see who God is and when we see who the person in front of us is, then we are moved to love.

Of course, sometimes we think we know God and we think we know the other, but we remain in hate or indifference. To truly know God and others, we must see beyond ourselves. The box we stuff the world into needs to be removed. We tend to view the world always in reference to ourselves. God is my God and what he has done for me. Others fall into my categories and their value is based on their relation to me. But, of course, God is completely beyond my comprehension; He is in and of Himself. And, others exist not in my world, but in God's world as their own created complete selves.

So, then, when we perceive God and others as they are, we are moved to love. This is extremely difficult to do which is why love is a fruit of the Spirit. We, by our humanly nature, cannot love. We cannot see, understand and know God and people, at least not all clearly. So, we are dependent on God's love. God, fully knowing us and fully knowing Himself was moved to love. We ask Him to make this move in us. We ask Him to turn our heads to Him and to others as we strive with all our might to continually do so. And, then, as we begin to perceive we ask him to move us to act upon our knowledge. We ask that in His love, we too might love.