What it really looks like

Loving God sounds easy, but don’t read this if you aren’t brave enough to face yourself.

I always considered loving God from a selfish point of view. I love Him because of all He gives me, for blessing me with life, for sending Jesus to die for my sins.

But to love Him just for being GOD is a lot more terrifying because it causes you to be morally just, but  not at all socially acceptable.

You have to be extraordinarily fierce to love God like you should. And you have to know who He really is.

Ephesians 3:14 calls God the Father from whom every family in Heaven and earth is named, and Matthew 23:9 says we have one Father, and He’s in Heaven.

In John 20:17 Jesus told Peter if he loved Him, “Feed My sheep.”

Sheep are prone to wander away, and to feed them, you must first recognize them, know them, seek them, and find them.  

Feeding His sheep means searching out the lost and the broken, patching them up with the word, and giving them hope in Jesus Christ. It also means feeding them if they need food. Giving to people who need it.

To love God as my Father, I also need to spend time with Him, and love His children.

Wait, what?

Love His children.

To do that, I must recognize that every human being on earth was uniquely designed by God. Even the ones who aren’t like me—the stinky ones, the toothless ones, the addicted ones, the different ones, the sick ones—all people have value and are loved equally by God.

This has never been more relevant than it is right now.

It’s impossible to ignore what’s going on in the world, and why would you want to? If you ignore one catastrophe, another will knock you off your feet.

Look at the opioid crisis. It may have gotten a little better, but we have a long way to go before we beat Big Pharma and heal our land of this sinister presence. Here’s a link to an article I wrote about why I will never be free of it.

If that particular drug addiction isn’t disturbing enough for you, do a little research on meth addiction. It’s also mentioned in the above article, and you can read a story here about a young mother who suffered from both mental illness and drug addiction. I wonder what it would’ve been like if her mother would’ve answered the call?

And I wonder if she’s alive today.

I work with a recovery group every week. It’s as healing as it is draining. If you think the addicted are limited to the homeless and mentally ill, you might be surprised to learn that Debbie who works at the insurance company down the road will trade her body for a hit of meth tonight and show up for work tomorrow morning.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

The human side of addiction is different than you think.

They aren’t all monsters. They’re your family.

It’s not in their control. It’s bigger than they are. They see the damage they’re causing and feel shame and humiliation. Still can’t stop.

They feel betrayed by everyone they love because they’re often left to deal with it on their own, mostly because of their own destructive choices. Doesn’t keep them from hurting.

They desperately seek small doses of approval and love and will give anything to anyone because they know what it’s like to do without. They’ll also steal anything from anyone because they know what it’s like to do without.

They still love their children.

It’s easy to love people who we think have their lives together, but once you find out they have real PROBLEMS, it gets a whole lot harder. The reason? Because then it might involve YOU. And you don’t want to get involved. We all like things easy, no confrontation, no conflict. Smooth sailing until we slide into home at the feet of Jesus.

Well that’s not how life works, Karen.

Real life isn’t always pretty. It’s hard, scary, unfair, and sometimes it’s downright gruesome. It can scar you up pretty bad and leave you with PTSD or something equally hard to talk about. Maybe you don’t know why that teenager has lines up and down her arms, but I do. I also know why she stays locked up in her room all the time. You can read my story about social anxiety here.

What the world needs is to know the truth in all its ugliness, but what we want is a prettied-up version of it, with only the parts we happen to agree with and make sure you leave out the rest.

No one wants to face it ALL, and I have to wonder if we’d be emotionally able to process it if we did take a cold hard look.

Nevertheless, I’m going to continue to get as close as I’m able and maybe get banned from ever writing anything anywhere ever again.

What happens when love turns to hate in the Christian heart?

It does, you know. You can deny it all you want to, until you go into the convenience store that’s owned by a person of the Islamic faith and while they’re ringing up your purchase you’re thinking that not only do they probably not use toilet paper, they also hate all Americans and wish you were dead.

But they won’t ever tell the preacher you bought that vodka and those blunts, so you’re going to keep going.

We all want justice to be done, but who even knows what that is?

We have a media that lies to us on a daily basis, and I guess the side you’re on is determined by which set of lies you choose to believe.

Somebody knows how that virus got out, and whether it was manufactured or came from a bat that a human was crazy enough to eat, and if they haven’t been murdered already, you can bet it’s on the agenda.

Maybe it IS caused by something other than what we’ve been socially influenced to believe, and we’re all about to be led like sheep to the slaughter, but somebody better decide on a conspiracy theory and stick to it so we can fight. Otherwise we’re all going to die. Or maybe not. Who knows?

We want to believe the police are there to serve and protect, but how can it always be true if what we’ve seen with our own eyes tells us a different story?

No one who has the internet missed the knee on the neck. No one will ever forget that. And it was big.

Big enough that we can’t run from the truth anymore.

If you were raised in the South, there’s a ten out of ten chance you were raised in a home with at least one racist.

Maybe a non-violent, “just joking around, I have friends of every color” kind of racist, but still a racist.

If you’re as old as I am, you can probably remember a whole lot more than you tell about the separation of blacks and whites and how it really looked back then. You might even want to say we’ve come a long way since then, because up until recently, you probably believed it was true.

It’s time to step out of your bubble of denial.

And I’m not just talking to white people. I’ve been a recipient of the other end of racism. It also exists. The words “cultural appropriation” come to mind. If anyone ever read my articles, I’d get slammed for that one. Lucky for me, I pretty much go unread. It’s still true though.

Pretty much nothing has changed since the sixties if you’re talking about attitudes. Maybe some laws have changed influencing equality in the workplace and schools. But PEOPLE haven’t changed. And that’s what’s wrong.

It’s a HEART problem. It can’t be solved by changing a few laws.

I was in my late teens when I realized I’d been lied to all my life. That’s when I knew for certain skin color was not a determining factor in the value of a human being. I never embraced a racist point of view, but the culture I grew up in dictated my life.

I had black friends growing up and I honestly never understood why they lived on the other side of the tracks and couldn’t come over to play at my house. But I heard the disparaging comments about the color of their skin. I heard the “n” word.

I don’t blame my family. My father was a good man. He had black friends. After he died, several came to see me. They told me of ways Daddy had helped them, been there for them, fed them, clothed them.

It was those conversations that started the change in me.

Nothing made sense to me until I understood that it was culturally unacceptable for Daddy to acknowledge what his heart knew. We were all the same.

I mentioned that the truth isn’t pretty. It’s hard, and it’s ugly, and no one wants to face it. That doesn’t make it less TRUE. That’s how I grew up.  

We did that. We were that. To some extent, we still are that.

And white privilege. I’ve balked at that so many times. I’ve been one of the ones to say it doesn’t exist, because I’ve worked hard for every single thing I’ve ever gotten and my life sure hasn’t been easy.

But it’s not the same.

When you’re white, you have a certain expectation that things will go a certain way, and they usually do.

If you get stopped by a police officer, you can be reasonably certain you won’t get dragged out of the vehicle and thrown down into the street unless you’re running your mouth or threatening in some way.

It probably won’t happen because of the color of your skin.

When you’re black, you can’t have that same expectation.

You can also expect to be looked at first if there’s a crime committed, and you happen to be in the area. Your color is associated with poverty, violence, low education levels, reliance on the government, and with mouthy bad attitudes.

Did I get this information off a statistical study?

No. I didn’t have to. I’m white. I know the associations. I hate that it’s true, but it is.

And the truth is very ugly.

I would like to see our nation band together to change the truth. To fix the heart problem. To learn to love God by loving His children, the way that our parents (while saying the n word at home) taught us to sing that old song—“red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight….”

But no. I recently read that this old song is racist too.

Apparently the “red” and “yellow” are racist terms. To be fair, I don’t think they were back when I sang the song.

Back to where this started, we must love the unlovable, pick up the fallen, go for the weary, feed the hungry, nurse the sick, protect the helpless, nourish and teach the children. Like the other old song says, “Rescue the Perishing.”

The Bible says in Psalms 97:10 that to love God means to hate evil. All forms of racism is evil, even the hidden ones, including the thoughts going around in your head when you encounter someone different from you.

I know I can’t love God without serving Him by serving others, and without fighting for the rights of others who are weary of fighting for themselves. This battle for equality can’t be won unless we all stand together against the enemies of hate and prejudice.

Violence and hate isn’t the answer and never could be. The only answer is love.

I could quote a hundred things from Martin Luther King, Jr but two stand out. The first is:

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

We might not know where this will end if we join forces as humans for a change, instead of fighting as blacks and whites. I have a pretty good idea of where it will end if we don’t, and it’s not good.

King also said:

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

And it is.

I can only love God by loving His children the way He does, or as close as a human can get to that. I can remember the stories of little girls who were forced to sit in the back of the classroom because they weren’t white, and couldn’t come over to my birthday party because they lived on the other side of the tracks.

I still know what it felt like for an old black man to press twenty five dollars in my hand with tears in his eyes and say, “Your Daddy bought me tires for my truck,” and everything that was out of balance in my head righted itself.

The outside isn’t the inside. The skin of a man doesn’t determine who he is.

Skin color, addiction, illness, education, level of crazy—none of these should be a factor in how I love and treat someone else. What matters is we are all God’s children, designed by Him, for a reason. We are all loved by Him.

To really love God just for being God, honor His greatest commandments, in Matthew 22:37-39. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love my neighbor—His children.

All of them.