I recently read a quote that really struck a chord with me.

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, ‘I was wrong.’” – Sydney Harris

Loving people can, at times, be a glorious experience especially when those people love you back and appreciate you.  However, loving people can also be brutally difficult especially when the people you love don’t like you or even hate you and don’t want to have anything to do with you.

It’s easy to listen to a song like Casting Crown’s “If We Are the Body” and agree with the lyrics in the bridge, “Jesus paid much too high a price for us to pick and choose who should come and we are the body of Christ” and the chorus, “But if we are the body, Why aren’t His arms reaching? Why aren’t His hands healing? Why aren’t His words teaching? And if we are the body, why aren’t His feet going? Why is His love not showing them there is a way?”, but it is much more difficult to live it out in our lives.

When it’s words in a song, or words in a book or on an electronic screen; intellectually we can agree. But what about when the person you don’t get along with suddenly shows up to participate in the small group or Bible study that you’ve been a part of for a long time? I know someone who had that happen, and they were brave enough to be brutally honest with me about how it made them feel. In short, the feeling was that the small group had been a haven, a place to escape some of life’s difficulties, and now that was gone.

Being the sensitive, caring and understanding person that I am, after listening for a while, I responded with something along the lines of; wouldn’t it just be awful if that person started attending regularly and then got saved, because then you’d have to put up with them for all of eternity in Heaven!

I thought it was fairly funny, but apparently not so much! It did help to put a different perspective on the situation though.

Whether it’s through showing love to someone who doesn’t like us, or going out of our way to include the excluded, or apologizing, here is what we need to remember:  When we were enemies of God, in love and at a great price, He gave up His son in the hope that we would one day return that love to Him.

Just as He did this for me, He did this for every single person. He loves you just as much as He loves me. The value that God puts on each one of us as individuals is tremendous. (Read John 3:16)

Once we understand this and can personalize and internalize it in the very core of our souls, then it requires much less effort to extend love to anyone regardless of how they feel about us in return.

In reading through the gospels and studying Jesus life when He was here on earth, one thing that stands out to me is how He went out of His way to demonstrate love to those who were unloved, and to include those who were excluded.  I am absolutely convinced it is because of His great love for each and every person. If God puts that high a value on every person, who are we to think it would ever be alright to exclude or not act in love towards anyone?

It’s a matter of exchanging our heart for His heart and learning to see people as He sees people.

Growing in maturity as a Christian is a process. As we strive to build our relationships with God, we should be able to identify areas that we have grown in and others should be able to see a difference in us as well.

As we are still near the beginning of 2014, one of my prayers is that I will grow in love and compassion for others, that I would see people the way that God sees them and that when they see me, they would catch a glimpse of Him.