love (n) \ˈləv\: unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another
...and they will know we are christians by our love.
sometimes things are meant to be simple.
So I've been thinking a lot about the phrase "faith like a child" once again this past week. For those of you who followed my blog over the summer, I wrote a bit about this idea while helping at the orphanage. Being back at Penn State, I unfortunately got pulled back away from kids and hardly even noticed it. Until this last weekend at church when we were eating lunch afterwards and all the adult tables were taken, so I went and ate with the kids. I quickly found myself sitting in the middle of a pretend school where I managed to get in trouble so often that I had detention every day for the rest of the semester. It was great. Block homes were being built on my lap and paper airplane bombers were attacking the bad villain (appropriately assigned to Sean Lobar) the whole lunch. Everything was so innocent again. I realize I need more moments like that at college.
Anyway, so I started thinking about the phrase "faith like a child." Naturally, I found a song that helped me figure some things out. Jars of Clay has a song called "Like A Child" which as the name implies, deals with this very thing. There was one line that really stuck out to me:
Not helping me a ton, I looked to the bible and found this:
It's neat how every now and then a verse from the bible just stands out to you and clicks. At first I wasn't exactly sure how recklessness fit in to the picture. Was it really all that bad a thing to lose my recklessness. But then I read John 12:24 and I think I began to understand what Jars of Clay may have meant.
So what does it mean to have absolutely no concern about consequences as a result of our love? I guess I always imagine that loving people will simply make everyone happy and will end our problems. Or perhaps that's the easy kind of love I gravitate to, meanwhile avoiding the other kind. The kind that requires you to stand up for and love the outcasts.
I have a sign that hangs above my bedroom door that says "Approach it with Love." I wonder how many situations I approach with love simply because it's the easy choice. Perhaps I should add a word in the middle of that phrase so that it says "Approach it all with Love."
That's the beauty with kids. They have no perception of the labels that our world may apply to the people around us. They don't care whether you have lots of money or toys. All they care about is that they have a common friend to love, be loved, and play with. Give them a few twigs and some grass and they'll be happy all day long.
Thinking back to the orphanage in Tanzania, it was amazing how open and welcoming all the kids were to us when we arrived. They had no idea who we were, what we had done the week before, or even what our motives were for coming to Africa. Even if our reason for traveling to Africa beforehand had been a selfish one, after meeting those kids and spending one day with them, that motive would have been completely erased. It was such a different form of love. Not once while I was there did we talk about love with any of the kids. The words I love you were never said, but it was very evident to everyone sitting around the dinner table the last night we were there that those were the feelings being felt. Those kids knew the day we arrived that we wouldn't be staying with them for long, that at some point we would have to leave for home. Yet even knowing that, they still loved us relentlessly.
I think sometimes in our lives we chose to love the easy ones. I know I'm guilty of thinking that I won't see such and such person for quite some time so loving them isn't as big a deal as loving the person who I see every day. I guess I feel at times that it is not possible to make a difference in such a short amount of time. I guess the kids in Tanzania proved me wrong. Reckless about what would happen from opening up to us, careless about what would happen once we had left, they knew what it meant when John said but if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.
Anyway, so I started thinking about the phrase "faith like a child." Naturally, I found a song that helped me figure some things out. Jars of Clay has a song called "Like A Child" which as the name implies, deals with this very thing. There was one line that really stuck out to me:
"...I wonder if I've grown to lose the recklessness?"I stared at it for awhile and finally decided to look up the definition of recklessness. According to some random dictionary online, recklessness means: utterly unconcerned about the consequences of some action.
Not helping me a ton, I looked to the bible and found this:
John 12:24Reckless in your love. Utterly unconcerned about what people will think or what will happen as a result of your love.
"...anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal."
It's neat how every now and then a verse from the bible just stands out to you and clicks. At first I wasn't exactly sure how recklessness fit in to the picture. Was it really all that bad a thing to lose my recklessness. But then I read John 12:24 and I think I began to understand what Jars of Clay may have meant.
So what does it mean to have absolutely no concern about consequences as a result of our love? I guess I always imagine that loving people will simply make everyone happy and will end our problems. Or perhaps that's the easy kind of love I gravitate to, meanwhile avoiding the other kind. The kind that requires you to stand up for and love the outcasts.
I have a sign that hangs above my bedroom door that says "Approach it with Love." I wonder how many situations I approach with love simply because it's the easy choice. Perhaps I should add a word in the middle of that phrase so that it says "Approach it all with Love."
That's the beauty with kids. They have no perception of the labels that our world may apply to the people around us. They don't care whether you have lots of money or toys. All they care about is that they have a common friend to love, be loved, and play with. Give them a few twigs and some grass and they'll be happy all day long.
Thinking back to the orphanage in Tanzania, it was amazing how open and welcoming all the kids were to us when we arrived. They had no idea who we were, what we had done the week before, or even what our motives were for coming to Africa. Even if our reason for traveling to Africa beforehand had been a selfish one, after meeting those kids and spending one day with them, that motive would have been completely erased. It was such a different form of love. Not once while I was there did we talk about love with any of the kids. The words I love you were never said, but it was very evident to everyone sitting around the dinner table the last night we were there that those were the feelings being felt. Those kids knew the day we arrived that we wouldn't be staying with them for long, that at some point we would have to leave for home. Yet even knowing that, they still loved us relentlessly.
I think sometimes in our lives we chose to love the easy ones. I know I'm guilty of thinking that I won't see such and such person for quite some time so loving them isn't as big a deal as loving the person who I see every day. I guess I feel at times that it is not possible to make a difference in such a short amount of time. I guess the kids in Tanzania proved me wrong. Reckless about what would happen from opening up to us, careless about what would happen once we had left, they knew what it meant when John said but if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.
Last night Penn State brought Paul Rusasabegina, the man in which Hotel Rwanda is based off of, to campus. Thousands of students filled the auditorium to hear this one man speak about his story. For nearly an hour and a half, Paul told his story of acting as a hotel manager during a genocide which sadly went nearly unnoticed by most of the ‘modern’ world. He talked about the countless bodies lining the road outside of his hotel. He talked about his family who he feared he may never see again. He talked about the multiple life and death decisions he had to make over a couple months. But had I not known any of that, he didn’t seem any different than all of the people sitting around me.
If I were walking to class and happened to pass Paul on the street, there’s nothing that would have made me stop and turn and follow him to hear his story. He would just be another person who I would soon forget about. But fortunately, Paul’s story has been made known, and people do stop and listen to his story. They may not recognize his face or fully know about the genocide, but when they hear Hotel Rwanda, they stop and listen.
So today as I walked around campus, I couldn’t help but check everyone out walking beside me. Checking out in the sense of pondering their stories. If they were brought to Penn State to talk to the campus and I were making posters for them, what would be the caption beneath their name? Would that flier inspire people to come out and listen to them talk. Sadly, I don’t think it would, at least for most of us. The majority of us don’t have stories like Paul, or at least so we think.
“Well there’s no way that my life story measures up to Paul’s, so I won’t bother sharing it with others. I don’t need to make a flier for myself.”
When I got back from Africa this past summer, the first week was great because I was excited and telling everyone about it. But soon after, for some reason, I started thinking that possibly people wouldn’t want to hear about it. For some reason I didn’t think that my stories were worth telling people. I didn’t want to hassle them. And unfortunately, I think a lot of people feel this way.
So what would happen if we intentionally went around trying to determine what were on each others fliers? I don’t think its good enough to just wait around for people to come to us with their stories, sometimes we have to go seeking the stories. And most of the time, seeking just involves sitting. Sitting and listening.
I find it pretty easy to sit and listen to a pre-planned, heavily publicized event, dealing about genocide coming from a person I only know from a flier. But why is it so much harder to sit and listen to the people I interact with daily. The people who will matter in the future.
Maybe because with an event like Paul, it’s easy to walk away and not do anything about it. I can walk away from the talk last night and not do anything and Paul will never know. Life will keep moving on like it did before.
But when the person talking to me is someone who personally knows me, it is so much harder. No longer can I walk away and ignore what was said. That person’s flier has now become part of mine.
As I continued to walk around campus today, I thought again to the question of whether I would stop to listen to Paul if he had passed me. And as I thought about Paul walking beside me, I soon found myself thinking about what if Jesus were walking beside me. Would I stop and listen to what he had to said? In Jesus’ time, did the people recognize his face and immediately know his story when they saw him? Or was their something about him that just made people stop and follow him? What made people want to sit and just listen to him for hours on end? Why don’t we act that way any more to the people around us? Why don’t we go looking for Jesus in everyone?
Below is a song by Monk and Neagle which really gets at this whole concept. Usually I just cut out the good section of a song and post it, but with this song, all of the lyrics need to be posted.
Twenty-First Time / Monk and Neagle
Nowhere to live
Nowhere to fall
He used to have money
But he’s wasted it all
His face is a photograph burned in mind
But I pretend not to see him for the twenty-first time
He sleeps under stars, it’s all he can afford
His blanket’s an old coat he’s had since the war
He stands on the corner of Carter and Vine
But I pretend not to see him for the twenty-first time
He may be a drifter who’s grown old and gray
But what if it’s Jesus and I walk away
I say I’m the body and drink of the wine
But I pretend not to see him for the twenty-first time
She’s 29 but she feels 48
She can’t raise three kids on minimum wage
She’s crying in back of the welfare line
But I pretend not to see her for the twenty-first time
She may be a stranger trying to get through the day
But what if it’s Jesus and I walk away
I say I’m the body and drink of the wine
But I pretend not to see her for the twenty-first time
This is a call for a change in my heart
I realize that I’ve not been doing my part
When I needed a Savior, I found it in Him
He gave to me, now I’ll give back to them
Drifter or stranger, daughter or son
I’ll look for Jesus in everyone
‘Cause I am the body and drink of the wine
And I’m thankful there’s more than the twenty-first time
So I realize that it has been way too long since my last blog entry, and many of you have reminded me to post a new blog entry. So here it is.
Now the past few weeks have been quite busy and are most likely why I haven’t found the time to write. At the beginning of January I traveled down to Jamaica to work on my engineering project that I have spent the past semester on. The trip went extremely well and let’s just say a lot was accomplished. But beyond all of the meetings that took place, beyond all of the sites we went to visit, and beyond all the lessons I learned from the trip, there was something more important that stuck with me throughout the week spent in Jamaica. The music.
The odds were that when you would get in a car, you would be listening to reggae. When you drove through the streets or the small shopping plazas, you would come across large speaker stands with accompanying DJ’s entertaining the passing crowds with reggae. Reggae followed you on the island.
I am very grateful that I was able to spend the week with someone from Jamaica, rather than coming in as a pure tourist. We didn’t stay in the tourist section of the country. In fact we spent our time in a city with one of the highest crime rates in the world. This was not your white sands and blue oceans that you imagine of when you think of Jamaica.
Instead, the Jamaica that I got to know was one of people. It was their food, their music, their driving, their patwa, their religion, their hospitality. It was in their buildings and homes decorated with such an unfamiliar color palette. It was in the way they left their homes all day and spent their time with one another on sides of roads. It was how they greeted one another. It was their love for their country. Their pride for their culture. It was hard not to admire that love that they carried with them.
Now it is very hard to go more than a day without hearing something about Bob Marley while on the island. I had heard of Bob Marley beforehand and knew that he was a big name and brought reggae music to the global scale, but I didn’t know of Bob Marley’s songs. Yeah I would recognize one if it were played over the radio, but I couldn’t tell you what the songs were about, or more importantly why they were written. Well my one week in Jamaica served as a crash course to Bob Marley and I now have a much greater appreciation for what he accomplished. More importantly though, an appreciation for what he stood for.
A little bit ago, Time Magazine rated all of the famous songs over the past few decades and decided upon one single song as the song of the millennium. It’s a song that everyone has heard nearly all over the world. It carries a simple message and was the anthem of Bob Marley throughout his career. The song was entitled One Love, and the title speaks for itself. There’s not much more to it.
I love being able to analyze lyrics and try to find out what the songwriter meant by them. But then I looked up Bob’s song One Love. And there was nothing to analyze.
It didn’t win its title for being song of the millennium because of its deep meaning. It won the title for it’s’ simplicity.
One Love! One Heart!
Let's get together and feel all right.
Hear the children cryin'; One Love!;As it was in the beginning; One Love!;
So shall it be in the end; One Heart!,
All right!
Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right;
I got the chance to walk through Bob’s house while in Jamaica and it was awesome to see how important his faith was to him. Bob was a Rasta and believed that the emperor of Ethiopia was the second Messiah and God incarnate. Now I don’t agree with what Bob believed in, but I admire how true he was to his beliefs. And I admire his idealism. At one of his concerts, Bob brought together the two opposing political party leaders of Jamaica together on stage and had them hold hands. He didn’t see why people couldn’t work together in unity.
As I go through college and talk with more and more people who have all kinds of experience in the real world, the whole idea of life as just dirty and things don’t work out how you’d like them to seems to surface more and more. I understand that I sometimes approach situations ideally and I’m told that as you get older, you begin to see things slightly more pessimistically. I wonder if that happens because theirs so few out there who feel that they can make a difference. Yeah there’s a lot of details that have to be looked over to make those changes in the world. And yeah there’s things that I don’t understand yet and will face down the road. But it seems that people like to tell you that the simple approach is rarely possible. But I wonder why Bob’s song was chosen as the song of the millenium. Out of all the songs out that have been written, a song which simply proposes getting together, praising the lord through one love, and feeling all right; is the one that was chosen.
Maybe it is that simple.
Like hinges straining from the weight
My heart no longer can keep from singing
Again, some more lyrics have been stuck in my head lately. This time they come from MercyMe’s new album. About a month ago MercyMe came to Penn State and they sang this song and ever since then, I have found myself singing this line over and over. And I got to thinking; I wonder what is causing the weight on my hinges.
Regardless of how hard we try, the weight always manages to sneak into our lives. And I used to think that all of that weight was a bad thing. Maybe the weight is caused from a few difficult courses causing you to struggle in school. Maybe the weight is caused from the death of someone close to you. Maybe the weight is caused from the end of a relationship. Maybe the weight is caused from a health problem. Maybe the weight is caused from a few difficult neighbors that push you to your limits. But what if all of that weight is what causes us to sing.
It’s not really the natural thing to do. A lot of tough things start building up in your life, so what do you do, you turn to God and thank him for all of it.
It was thanksgiving today and what I tend to find myself doing is thanking God for all of the awesome things he has placed in my life recently. I look at all of the good things around me and am so grateful for them because they are what have caused me to get to where I am now. But what about the hard things? They have had an equal role in getting me to this point too.
Maybe this is just me being optimistic, which I’m still not convinced is a bad thing. But think about it…
Like hinges straining from the weight. We are straining to hold ourselves together, as if hanging anything else on that door will cause it to tear off and crumble to pieces. But it’s hard for me to imagine that God is a god who likes to rip doors off of their hinges. He’s not out to see how much weight it takes to rip our hinges out of the wall. But I’d be willing to bet that he also likes to see those hinges being used. Hinges with no door on them, with no weight on them, really don’t serve much of a purpose.
I think when we finally understand that we are meant to praise God for our weight, to thank him for not only the good in our lives, but the tough as well; we will finally begin to understand what it means to sing from our heart. As Rush of Fools writes:
You are infinite worth
When we’ve not the words
Our hearts will sing
We are here on the earth
And somehow we‘re heard
When our hearts sing to You
I think too often I associate blessings with good things, with comfortable things. But it’s the uncomfortable that shapes us, that teaches us.
According to my little sister, one of my annoying habits is that I sing quite poorly in the shower in the morning. Luckily for me, God doesn’t care what it sounds like. I’m not even sure he cares too much about when our voices sing at all. As long as our hearts are singing the same song, God is smiling down on us. Praise and worship take root within our hearts. It doesn’t matter if you’re raising your hands, or singing with your eyes closed. Maybe singing isn’t even your thing. I think God looks a little deeper than what we can see. He’s got a higher priority, a vested interest with our heart. He plants His seeds in our heart. It’s our turn to nurture that seed and use what it grows into for a grander purpose. We all have a different seed and a different end result. But look at nature around us.
Think of how many seeds it has taken to grow what you see around you. Sorry, just one more set of lyrics to include. Eleventyseven has a song that has the following few lines:
I wish that You would tell me how
You know me well and want to be together.
Fallin' short and faded out
but You keep making gardens in this desert.
despite the grace that I dismiss
forgiveness was the catalyst
to penetrate my heart with what is true.Redeem the years I've thrown away
I'm ready to make good on what I've wasted.
I'm asking You to shape my heart,
I wanna be Your work of art.
'Cuz when You change me and make me more like YouIt's beautiful
You can turn mistakes to miracles.
The way that you still love me after all
It's beautiful.So help me God forbid
I never take for granted
This endless gift You give.
What are we going to do with our seed? What garden are we going to be apart of? You keep making gardens in this desert…
It’s hard for me to understand why some people do the things they do. I look back on the Holocaust in Germany and wonder how so many people could have treated others like they did. I look back on Rwanda and wonder how families could turn on one another and kill their own kin. I look now at Burma and wonder how men can open fire on peaceful monks. Is it not obvious to some that we are all the same?
Most of you are probably familiar with Bono’s song ‘One.’ After watching videos about what is currently happening in Burma, I couldn’t get these lyrics out of my head.
We're one, but we're not the same.
Well, we hurt each other, then we do it again.
You say love is a temple, love a higher lawOne love, one blood, one life, you got to do what you should.
One life with each other: sisters, brothers.
One life, but we're not the same.
We get to carry each other, carry each other.
One, one.
We hurt each other, then we do it again. I guess that’s the part that doesn’t sit right with me. We all mess up. We are all judgmental and we all view others through tinted lenses. But how can we continue to make these mistakes. How can a soldier in Burma burn a mother’s home, watch as she and her family retreat into the jungle, and then move on to the next home and do the same thing?
Yet it’s so easy for me to question those half-way around the world that are doing acts that deliberately destroy the notion of ‘one’, but do I take the time to analyze my own life as well? Shooting a monk in prayer or burning village after village is clear to us that something is not right. But how much time do I take to look at my life. What bridges do I burn down? It’s probably not as obvious, but they’re there.
We get to carry each other. God gives us the option of either building up those around us, or tearing them down. It seems like the option we should pick would be so clear. And talking about it is easy. But doing it is hard. You got to do what you should. We should be carrying one another. You should be loving one another. You should be living this life as one.
It seems simple, and part of me wants to look for a deeper meaning behind the song. Where’s the catch? As an engineer I’m taught to question. As a college student I’m expected to think about things on a deeper level. Never be satisfied with your initial view of something, always look from a different angle.
But the more angles I approach it from, the more I find that I’m simply thinking about it too much. ‘One’ is simple. Think of one grain of sand. Think of one blade of grass. Think of one pencil stroke. One star. One smile. One tree. One atom. One guitar. One child. One degree. One sunset. One color. Think of one…
It’s simple.
One love. One blood. One life.
There’s nothing complex about that. As humans, we feel like we need to know more, we need to dive deeper. We need to read more books explaining love before we can feel it. We need to hear more sermons about love before we can act on it. We need to hit play on the song ‘One’ just one more time before we can understand it.
But love is a higher law.
We keep looking for love within our own contexts and laws. Truly we must be able to explain it. If you look up love in the dictionary you’ll find “a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.” This is love according to our law. But love is higher.
What good does it do to define love with words? Define love with life.
Once we understand this, then we will begin to understand ‘one.’ We seem to like making things harder than they should be. It gives us something to do with our time. But think of what we could be doing with that time? I wonder…
This past weekend a good friend of mine passed away. He was a friend to many. Although his official role was to teach us about physics, he taught us so much more. Everyone has that one teacher that has shaped who they have become, has guided them to their present spot, has encouraged them through thick and thin, has loved them as their own child. You tend to put that teacher in a special spot in your past and expect that they will always be there to teach those younger than you. As if they were there when the school was built and will be there until the day it crumbles. Unfortunately that's not how life works.
My friend once wrote me a letter. In it he wrote the following:
"Life is tough. Life is good. Although these sound like contradictory statements, they are not. They are simply two aspects of life. How you decide to handle this apparent dichotomy will determine your outlook in life. In my life, I've found that if I concentrate on how tough life is, the goodness of life seems very small. But if I focus on how good life is, the tough parts of life seem much more manageable."
As a freshman in high school, those words didn't carry the same weight as they do now. Life is tough. Life is good.
When you hear of unexpected deaths, you tend to associate a lot of questioning along with the death. Why would they take them away so soon? They were so young, with so much left to do? However, I'm not asking those questions this time around. My friend had come and done what he was sent to do. God had laid some very specific goals on his heart, and I don't doubt that he didn't finish every one of them. If only I could live like that... Think, to be able to go to bed every night and be more than satisfied with what you have accomplished. To know that you had made a difference in someone's life.
I sometimes wondered how my friend could have a smile on his face every day. He wore a smile painted in sincerity. It was genuine. It was love. It was what we needed as high school freshman.
David Crowder writes in one of his songs:
And I don't know
How to be a love like that.
When all the love in the world
Is right here among us
And hatred too.
And so we must choose
What our hands will do
My friend knew how to be a love like that. It was in his smile, in his open door, in his listening ear.
Over the past few days, the amount of love and gratitude that has been expressed concerning the impact my friend has made on others has been overwhelming. How can one man accomplish so much? I think the difference was that he didn't sit around wondering what he could do in the future to make a difference. He made a difference in the here and now.
"Wherever you are and wherever you go, never forget to make a difference."
Stop planning, start acting. Do something. Be love. Look at those around you. These are the people God has entrusted you with. You are meant to impact them.
My friend knew that.
I'm not upset that God took him away from us. I am happy for him. He spent his whole life reflecting the light that Christ shines on us, and now he gets to spend his days living alongside that light. That's cool. I am so thankful that he was able to impact as many people as he did. We are always wondering how certain things can possibly be a part of God's plan. My friend was able to impact thousands of students' lives. I don't think we all realized though exactly what he was doing. He was humble and simply lived his life out to the best of his ability. Now that he is gone, we all recognize the full extent of what he did. Is it sad that it took his death for us to fully realize this? Yeah. But do you think God thinks it's sad? I don't think so. My friend's sole purpose in life was to make a change. I believe we all have this similar purpose. Sometimes that change happens during our life. Sometimes that change happens after our life. Luckily for my friend, he made a change both during and after his life. That's not something to be sad about.
I doubt my friend is sitting up in heaven and wishing he could have had one more day to finish his job. Rather, he's sitting above us with the same smile that was so familiar to all of us still on his face. Is he looking down on us and watching how the next chapter plays out? I don't think so. The bible never says that those in heaven will pay special attention to this world once they arrive. He's with his Lord and this world was simply a stepping stone to where he is now. Earth is a connection point. Not a final destination. It's like the terminal of an airport. None of us get excited to arrive in terminal C4, we are more concerned with where we are flying to. But the terminal is a necessary part of the trip. This world is a necessary part, but it is simply preparing us for the grand destination. God was ready for my friend to fly on out. I am more than happy for him.
And he did all that he could in that terminal. He made a difference.
Way to go Mr. Way.
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