Love Wins

 "What Mister Rogers taught us is that the dignity of a person is not dependent upon anything except the fact that they exist and are made in the image of God. His or her attitude, opinions, political affiliation, education, race, gender, or even their words or actions are not the defining factor of their person even if we disapprove or disagree, even if the person is arrogant, ignorant, or annoying, even if the person does things differently than we would do." Emily P Freeman

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend a visitation for the death of a man who was well loved. As I stood in the funeral home and looked around, it was obvious he loved well.

Unfortunately attending funeral visitations seems to be a thing I do now.

It's a beautifully sad thing to step into the journey of grief with a family.

While the media, and perhaps your morning social media feed as well, would like for us all to think we are very different, we all have a lot more in common than we think.

We all love someone.

Someone loves us.

And there will be a day when those someones are standing in a funeral visitation line waiting to greet each other.

In the moment of extremes, as a community we seem to be able to show up for each other.

But I worry that in the doing life day to day, we are FAR from where we need to be.

We create division where division was never meant to exist.

We forget that we are all images of God.

I started my day praying for mother. A few weeks out of a knee replacement surgery and she is battling COVID. Her immune system has taken a beating the last few years - the cancer, the chemo, the multiple surgeries - and then more recently the ankle, and now the knee.

I have to quietly rally my prayer warriors because publically her battle is political.

Not personal.

And to me, and all who loves her, it's personal.

We, as a community, can not love each other well because we've forgotten that we are arguing, debating, and being ugly about people.

It is very much your right to make any decision you see fit for YOU.

But when you publicly insult and are ugly about those who make a different decision, you are forgetting that those image bearers made their own decision too. A decision they had a right to make.

Or hold an opinion they have a right to hold.

We create a community where someone like me doesn't ask you to pray for her mother because she's no longer a person and is very much a statistic in a poorly argued political debate.

It's kind of hard to see Jesus amongst all of it.

We should know our people want to pray for our needs above and beyond their stances on all the things.

I don't know about you but that's not how my feed looks this morning.

We've created division where division was never intended to exist.

Mama Warriors, I wonder how many times we miss the opportunity to really show up for each other because we've given the impression than anything other than loving each other as image bearers is our main goal?

I wonder how often we create division by our words and actions?

As the weather cools just a tad, I encourage us all to take a deep breath and let change seep into our soul.

Let's be ready to exhale love for ALL His people above all else.

Hate was never intended to win.