A solemn walk across the glass enclosed walkway from the hospital met us unexpectedly with an array of flashing police lights and tow trucks.  Although rather than the typical display of one or two vehicles flashing, there were at least a dozen, and crowds of people gathered around.  Reds and oranges were joined with greens, blues, and pinks.  This was not the making of a catastrophic incident.  This was a gathering.  One outside the children’s hospital, where crowds holding brilliantly colored light sticks and rows of outfitted police vehicles were putting on a light show for the children that found themselves confined to their hospital beds within stark plastered walls.  And up on the 8th floor, the 11th floor, the 14th floor, you could make out small, singular lights waving in return. 

Although this beautiful gathering sounds to be held once a month, how often do we relegate a moment to love others in the simplest of ways to the sights and sounds of the holiday season?  As though Christmas cheer and good tidings are when good is required of us, yet if we’re honest, we feel more a response of obligation than acting on our own volition.  Only to hurriedly resume our anxious ridden lives of busyness and self-promotion.  Now mind you, I would want no less local programming and church planning that creates avenues to tend towards the needy and the hurting, but let’s bring the heart of the matter a bit closer to home.  The way in which you love, whether the down trodden or the simply broken, is not to be relegated to a seasonal imposition, upon which you are swayed by the bell ringing Santa Claus or incessant  lobby sign ups.  And for the moment I’m not even talking about serving the poor or refugees or enslaved.  Let’s begin with the way you love those in your corner.  Easy to love, so it would seem, those who love you back, except in all our cultural wanderings I believe we have even lost sight of how to love those closest to us.  No wonder volunteering in the Christmas season feels like a chore; as our foundation of love even towards those we consider close has instead been dwindled down to how it can serve the self.  Perhaps not intentionally, for we’re all just as broken as the gravel beneath our feet, but we love most willingly when it benefits us.  When that love will be shared, or our self affirmation catered to, or our fragile ego mended.  Yes perhaps it is easier to love when we have a piece ourselves in the ring, but then perhaps the question becomes, is that really love at all?  Or at least, love in the finest.  Have we forgotten that love itself is only seen in its full splendor when given with no personal joy or acquisition, except for the benefit of those for which that love was called.  Before we can joyfully serve those in need, we must first understand love in the everyday.  A giving of self that does little to benefit you personally.  Only then will you find you know how to love in the fullness of how love was intended, and somehow still feel more affirmed, spoken into, and tended to than you could have otherwise.  Love is odd like that.  You receive more of it when you willingly give it away.

EXPOSITION: Do you find yourself loving more readily when you anticipate it being reciprocated or when that love has the capacity to speak into your sense of self?  (If your answer is anything other than “yes”, you might as well throw on a pair of wings and float up to heaven, because you’ve rid yourself of the human nature.  Well done.)  Do you catch yourself becoming a bit grumpy, or hasty, or impatient when loving someone requires you to give up a piece of yourself, such as your time or energy?

RISE: What you allow yourself to be taught about love will shape the way you love others, and even yourself.  Consider writing down what you feel love in its finery looks like.  Challenge your perspective on love and narrow down that list to love that benefits another and does little for yourself. Stay away from how you tell people they can or should love.  This is about how you love people directly.

DENOUEMENT:  “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”