1 John 4: 1-21 (links validated 4/4/24)

Once upon a time a young man and a young woman were very much in love, but they were very poor. After they had paid the rent, and the heating bills, and bought their groceries, and paid their bus fares, they had only just enough to live on, and they couldn’t afford proper winter coats, so waiting at the bus stop they were often cold. And the winter was getting colder for soon it would be Christmas. One day, the girl was in the town looking in the shop windows when she saw a gold watch chain, and she just knew that the young man would love it. She so wanted to give it to him for Christmas, but she had no money. How could she buy it for him? She walked sadly away, and then she had an idea. She went to the hairdresser's shop, and had all her long golden hair cut off. The man in the shop put it in a bag for her and she went home and sold it on the Internet to someone who made wigs from real hair. With the money safely in her bank account she went back and bought the watch chain.

Margaret Hillis, the late director of the Chicago Symphony Choir, told the story of how when four she was playing by a pond near her home, she fell into water that was over her head. She remembers thinking that she must swim, and she did. Crawling up onto solid ground, already worrying about what her punishment would be, she saw her father sitting on the opposite bank. He had made no move to rescue her, just as he made no move now either to congratulate her or take her to task. "There was a strange comfort in it," she says. "He had let me learn to depend on myself—yet he was there if I needed him." To truly care is to do not the easy thing, the applauded thing, the wished thing, but the wise thing, the right thing...

In her book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott relates a story told by Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia. His parents told him that without a blood transfusion she would die. They also explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers and, if so, he would be a good blood donor. They asked him if they could test his blood. He said sure. So they did and it was a good match. Then they asked if he would donate to his sister a pint of his blood because it could be her only chance of living. He said he would have to think about it overnight. The next day he went to his parents and said he was willing to donate the blood. So they took him to the hospital where he was placed on a gurney beside his six-year-old sister. Both of them were hooked up to IV’s. A nurse withdrew a pint of blood from the boy and transferred to his sister’s IV. The boy lay on his gurney in silence while the blood dripped into his sister, until the doctor came over to see how he was doing. The boy opened his eyes and asked, “How soon until I start to die?”

"C.S. Lewis wrote: 'Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place where you can be perfectly safe from all the perturbations of love is Hell.'..."

In Frederick Buechner’s novel The Final Beast someone is talking to a pastor about his recent encounters with a guilt-ridden women in the congregation. This person begs this pastor to declare God’s forgiveness to this deeply disturbed woman. The pastor claims the woman knows that the pastor has forgiven her. “But she doesn’t know God forgives her. That’s the only power you have– to tell her that. Not just that God forgives her for the poor adultery. But for the faces she can’t bear to look at now… Tell her God forgives her for being lonely and bored, for not being full of joy with a household of children… Tell her that her sin is forgiven whether she knows it or not, tell her what she wants to know more than anything else—to know what all of us want to know. What on earth do you think you were ordained for?”

I was just twenty years old when I met Jiera and although we didn’t know one another for a long time, Jiera managed to challenge me to become a better christian. We were working together at a large, international, department store on Regent Street, in the heart of London. We both worked in the Food Courts were there wasn’t much time for pleasantries. But Jiera never let that stop her from being not only pleasant to unpleasant customers, she went out of her way to be kind. Jiera insist that, “There’s always time for kindness.” Jiera was my immediate manager; while I supervised a group of eight young women, women much like myself, temporary workers, intending to stay just long enough to earn enough money before resuming our travels. Jiera was in it for the long haul, already a young mother of three beautiful children of her own, she soon became the surrogate Mom to those of us who worked for her. Jiera’s kindness made her easy to love and a joy to obey, as each of us did our best to please her. It didn’t take long for us to become a family, with Jiera chiding us to care for one another. One morning the store manager gathered us all together in Jiera’s absence to announce that Jiera would not be in to work for a few days because her daughter had been killed in an accident...

In 1975, I was asked to serve as the pastor of a church in Quinlan, Texas, just east of Dallas near Lake Tawakoni. When I arrived, I learned that the former pastor had set up a bank account to help those who called on the church for assistance. He called it the "Love in Action" fund. One day a young couple dropped by the church on their way through town. It seems they'd had a run of bad luck. They'd lost their jobs and had to move out of their apartment. They'd gone to his parents' house, but his parents were unable to help. They'd gone to her parents' house, but her parents asked them to leave. They'd been sleeping in the car for the past week, pooling their money for peanut butter and crackers, cokes and sardines. Now, they were out of money, about out of gas, completely exhausted and ready to throw in the towel. They had decided to split up and go their separate ways, not because they no longer loved each other, but because they simply didn't know what else to do. When they saw a car in front of the church, they decided to drop by, more or less as a last-ditch effort. I asked them to sit down, and we began to talk, but it was obvious, we weren't going to make much headway, as tired as they were. So, I sent them out to a small motel on the edge of town where I agreed to pay for their room for two nights, plus meals at the adjacent café. They said they'd come back and see me on the third day. Sure enough, three days later they knocked at the door of my study. I couldn't believe the transformation. They didn't look like the same couple as before. They were clean and fresh, with bright smiles on their faces. Their clothes were washed and ironed. What's more, they had a plan. They said they were going to drive to Commerce, where he would enroll at East Texas State University, and she knew a place to get a job. They figured they could get into married students' housing, and he could get a job on campus, if he needed to. As for counseling, they just looked at each other and laughed and said, "No thanks. We just came by to say thank you." What's funny about this story is that, a few days later, the treasurer of the church got the bill from the motel. He called and asked me what was going on. "What do you mean?" I asked, "Did the motel overcharge us?" He said, "Oh, no, they gave us a great rate." "So, what's the problem?" I asked. He laughed and said, "Oh, I don't know, it's just that, when we set up the account, I had no idea this is what we meant by love in action!"...

In his book, Strength to Love, Martin Luther King, Jr. talks about the need to be both tough-minded and tenderhearted. He writes: "The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble. But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony." (p. 9) He goes on to say that Jesus recognized the need for blending opposites when he taught his disciples to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. (Matthew 10:16) He says, "We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart."...

("A young man went to get a picture of his girl friend picture duplicated. It had to be removed from the frame. In doing so, he noticed an inscription on the back of the photo written by his girlfriend: 'My dearest Tommy: I love you with all my heart..." and other illustrations)

A popular meme series on Facebook called “You had one job.” It shows how often we fail at things which should be simple. Imagine a misspelled stop sign. A cryptic sign on a trash bin reads “empty when full.” There is a “back-to-school” display of large kitchen knives. That seems inappropriate, unless it’s a cooking school, perhaps? A cake decorator was too literal with the directions and put these four words on the cake “Just Write Happy Birthday.” Or the sign that says, “Give cyclists space,” which sits in the middle of the bike lane. You wonder what happened in each situation. Was someone in a rush? Were they distracted or just too lazy to care? There are enough fails to publish a yearly calendar with a “You had one job” photo for every day...

Scroll down the page for these reflections.

Scroll down the page for this resource.

Scroll down the page for this resource.

Don Krause is an artist. One of the most difficult times in his life was his wife’s 8-year battle with cancer. He says that he kept turning to God for help and God kept showing up in the love of friends and family. He created a gallery of portraits called “What Does Jesus Look Like?” The first portrait is of Joan. Joan was a family friend. When Don called to tell her that his wife had died, Don says, “she pours out love and wants to take something off my plate. She won’t take no for an answer. Hesitantly, I gave her the catering to do after the memorial service, only with the understanding that I was paying. Joan said, “Cross it off your list consider it done, and forget about it.” After I hung up, I felt a huge burden lifted. Following the funeral, there was a room next door where people were invited to stay for lunch. The food was perfect, people hung out, it was well done. . . . When I got home I was emotionally exhausted. Later, I heard a knock on the door. I opened the door only to see a van pulling away into the night with a hand waving out the window. Taped on the storm door was an envelope; inside a check for over $900. The note which accompanied the check read, ‘Here’s the money left over from people who wanted to help with the cost of the catering.’ Jesus comes to us in many forms and faces; this for sure is one of them.”...