Love

Originally wrote Friday, July 10, 2009 at 2:17pm.

Tonight is my final evening in the states. So, if I have any readers, this is a final note for you to perhaps enjoy before I leave to a country which, if it is God's will, I may end up not returning from. ;-P

Growing up as a child, I felt unloved. I can't really put a finger on exactly what it was that caused such a feeling. It may have been that my mother was working all of the time, so I rarely had her around to draw support from. It may have been that my father was emotionally abusive. It could have been the lack of a stable environment to grow up in, since my father was in the Air Force and we regularly moved not long after I had established friends at our new home. Inevitably the continuous moving caused me to stop attempting to establish friends and caused me to be more and more introverted and reclusive. It can certainly be a loveless existence to be alone.

Fortunately, in my continuing walk with God, I have found the warmth of His church and the members of my Christian family. While it is a continuing process of becoming free to feel safe among the members and to learn the nature of socialization which I had never really had the opportunity to learn before, I am slowly and inevitably growing in comfort around these friends, peers, brothers, and sisters. It is a unique experience to have a group of supporters that cry with you when you are sad, exult with you when you are happy, pray for you when you need prayer, and have unending reserves of encouragement and happiness when you meet the challenges and elations that walking a life devoted to Christ provides. While I do not mean to slight my own blood family, my Christian family has shown me more love and support and contact over the past year than I have ever received from my worldly family. I find this to be an awesome testament to Christ's love.

Ginger had an opportunity to see my true self, for but a moment. Just about everyone had left for downtown State College from our fourth of July party and it was just me and Heather out on the front lawn. I dropped my guard and started acting as my silly self tends to act when the defenses are not in place to guard me from the unfamiliarity of trying to act properly in front of other people that might be perplexed at my carefree silliness. To see me in my most natural uninhibited state would be like the realization that squirrels, when people are not looking, pull out tables and sit together in groups to play cards. Ginger, for the brief moment that I thought only Heather could witness my silliness, was able to bear witness to the squirrel in his act of seemingly unnaturalness.

America, at least from a worldy perspective, is judgmental. We have an idea that we call "normal". We expect people to act in a way that conforms to the common perspective of normalcy. When anyone acts in a way that is contrary to the norm, we ridicule, attack, tear down, reprimand, and ostracize them. We use peer pressure to force people to conform to the way we act. The most horrible point of this attitude is that, in sin, we pressure others to join us in our sin. With the social pressures, more and more people attempt to join the norm, which is sinful. We become defeated and fall into the normalcy of the world and its worldliness. Even the Christian writers that I am reading from call others that fully follow Christ and have spoken of his teachings with true faithfulness and belief as being "extremely radical".

In Christ, we need not maintain appearances. In trying to expand my ability to love others and to love as Christ has loved me, I have developed a new way to observe other people. I have been trying to understand how God sees people, and the best analogy I have come up with is to think of individuals not as bodies, but as stars. God sees the spirit, men see the body. I like to think of God's perspective of what we look like as being that of seeing the many stars that are in a galaxy. To Him, we must seem to be varying light sources which differ in magnitude in proportion to how fully our hearts are turned to Him. He looks at the hearts of men instead of their bodies. If we all looked at people as pinpricks of light held in space, rather than looking at "fat" or thin, pretty or "ugly", old or young, or any other physical aspect, how much easier would it be to leave the accompanying condemnation and judgement of another person's looks behind? This analogy also fits well to the concept of being light to the world as Christians. It also makes it quite understandable that, as being lights in the world of varying magnitudes, how Satan might be able to easily perceive those lights at work and move to snuff them out.

I would encourage you to realize that there is no normal. We are all individuals loved for our individuality. God made each one of us. He loves all of us. Surely He also loves our differences.I would like to thank all of the brothers and sisters in Christ that have made me feel welcome in Christ's family. I have tried to tag all of you that have had an impact on my life since I began this journey of transformation.

Pray for us while we are in Rwanda, that God would work through us and that we would be open to the fact that we are more apt to be worked in by God than to accomplish work for God.

Your brother in Christ,
Jeremy