Mondays are hard to love.  The week stretches out long, feeling overwhelmed before it starts.  People stretch patience out long, and snap back disgruntled and tired, after the weekend.  Snow-gray skies stretch overhead, coloring everything dull.  But Jesus whispers “Love your neighbor as yourself…as I have loved you.”  This is where it starts, on Mondays, with the laundry and the to-do lists and the back-to-work routine.

Love isn’t brilliant or exciting on Mondays.  It is persevering. It is folding up carefully of shirts and tongues and moments, and offering grace.  It is steady.  It doesn’t rock off balance just because life does, or shift with the weather.  It is humbling.  It bends to wash dirty footprints on the kitchen floor, to answer the phone with a listening ear, to help with spelling words, to set the dinner table.

Love on Mondays is how we know for sure that this is for real: that God’s love is poured out in our hearts and we are changed because of it.  Love on Mondays is how we prove our love for Him and give thanks back to Him. Love on Mondays is the way to show the watching world that God’s love is big enough to change the world, one day at a time.

“Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God; and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him….For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.”  (1 John 5:1, 3)

“Loving means losing control of our schedule, our money, and our time.  When we love we cease to be the master and become a servant [of Christ].”  (Paul Miller)

In studying for our lesson this week, about the new commandment to love, I was reminded that this isn’t new at all.  It is the ancient command from God, given to His people, the first instructions on how to live in covenant with Him, how to live as covenant people with one another: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deut.6:4-5)  And “…you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” (Lev. 19:18)

From the beginning, this was the standard for God’s people.  What Jesus added was the measure of it: His own life example.  “…just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”  (John 13:34)  Something we know, but forget we know, need to be brought face-to-face with repeatedly.  “Just as I have loved you…” means messy all-out everyday giving of hands’ work and body’s strength, food for hungry mouths and hungry hearts, slowing to listen, being burden-bearers alongside, even when we feel the weight of our own need.

Maybe especially when we feel our own need, because that is what self-sacrifice is all about, giving up our needs in order to serve someone else’s, and trusting God to meet our own.  Our homes could be incubators for this God kind of love…. the needs are endless there, and our hearts are knit to these people, and in the chaotic ordinary moments of living together there are endless opportunities to give up self and become a servant.

I feel small next to Jesus’ standard.  “As I have loved you…”?.  With enough willpower and discipline I can do good to others.  But how can I pour out love like Jesus did, give as much as He did, and how especially to the difficult ones?  I don’t have it in me unless He creates it in me, transforms me into someone new– someone more like Him.  This is what A.B. Simpson called “living the Christ-life” and what the apostle Paul meant when he said “consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Rom.6:11)

Then come,  Lord Jesus…have more of me so I can have more of You, and fill up this small dry heart with the abundance of Your Spirit, and let it pour out into all my everyday places.  If I am to obey this new commandment, I need Your flow of Living Water renewed continually.

“You are my supply, my breath of life, still more awesome than I know….and all of You is more than enough for all of me, for every thirst and every need. You satisfy me with Your love and all I have in You is more than enough.” (Enough, Chris Tomlin and Louie Giglio)

True Christianity is not merely believing a certain set of dry abstract propositions: it is to live in daily personal communication with an actual living person – Jesus Christ.  ( J.C. Ryle)

Last Wednesday we started Cynthia Heald’s Becoming a Woman who Loves study.  For the next three months or so we will be studying God’s agape love and our debt to love others once we experience His.

At some point someone shared how much she appreciated God’s kind patience and gentleness and I joked that it often seemed more like a tidal wave.  We laughed while knowledge flashed through the room of the hard places He brings us to: the consequences of our waywardness, long weary illnesses, grief in the night, pouring out the heart in prayers that seem unanswered, mother’s burdens for her children.  And His love, mysterious and relentless, pursuing us in the midst of it all, calling us to come close and worship anyway, because He is faithful and good, and He never stops loving us.  As C.S.Lewis wrote, “We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character (The Problem of Pain, p.42).” More like a crashing ocean than a warm fuzzy blanket, but larger and more real because of it.

So as we dive into this exploration of God’s agape love, I feel sure it will not be weeks spent on feel-good sentiments and placid assurances of a Father’s acceptance.  He is a loving Father, but He is God Almighty, the Maker and Ruler of the universe.  The love He calls us to is “the rugged choice to do the right thing” (Jon Tal Murphree).  The Beloved One we follow hung on the cross and in the midst of His suffering called out forgiveness.  As we study, may our own love grow more rugged and strong in the everyday places of life.

“He is jealous for me, loves like a hurricane; I am a tree, bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy.  When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory, and I realize just how beautiful You are and how great Your affections are for me.  Oh, how He loves us….” (John McMillan, How He Loves)

I am not a risk-taker by nature.  I am a planner, an organizer, a gatherer of information.  I enjoy routine and familiarity.  But this business of following Christ, following the Call, it means stepping out to the end of the limb over and over again, following His beckoning into the unknown and, like a child, expecting Him to catch me.

Not that I’ve learned to climb out fearlessly.  When I was new to all this, I thought I would get over the fear with experience and prayer and maturity.  So I pressed on through sleepless nights, wobbly knees, and weight-on-my-chest panic attacks, calls for help flung heavenward, hanging on for dear life, thinking that someday I could be polished and confident out there on my own.

By now I have accepted the fact that the fear is not going anywhere.  It is part of my brokenness, and instead I have learned to feel it, recognize it for what it is, and step blindly into the unknown future anyway.  He is big enough to carry all that fear, and big enough to catch me too, and His plans are big enough that I wouldn’t miss out on them for anything, just for the sake of feeling safe.  Because nothing is safe in this world except it is in His arms.

So when I started hearing the small voice saying it was time to write again, and it didn’t fade with time, I looked for a Where and a When, even while the fears were talking in my head about what people would think– and what if I tried and failed– and what if I were transparent and it was all for nothing.  And one day it was quite clear there was a new branch to climb out onto.

Every week in our small group I meet with a roomful of women who are transparent about loving Jesus and wanting to grow more like Him; we laugh and sometimes cry, and share our struggles, and study God’s Truth to find our way through this life.  It’s a personal risk, connecting with other women in a small group, but it is well worth it.  In the between times, we pray for one another and think about what we have learned so far, and I will write my own thoughts here for them, and for all of us women who are following after Christ into the unknown.  Because it is worth it.