Love and Truth are not Enemies
Jim Ladd
“Finding a place of belonging is an incredibly special experience. It’s not something that happens overnight and may take months, even years, of searching. But, when you do find that place or group of people that welcomes and celebrates you, you create connections that last a lifetime.” - Avian de Keizer Mendoza (SPSCC Sound Waves, Summer 2022)
Avian is a running start student and identifies as queer. He seeks to be an advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community. His statement summarizes the modern cultural challenge of the Church: to welcome and celebrate all people as we help them find and follow Jesus.
What makes this especially challenging is that all humans, Christians and others, seem to agree that love and truth are enemies. That is, unless we agree about everything, we cannot welcome and celebrate each other. That we cannot love one another unless we absolutely agree with one another. So, we continue to cluster only among homogeneous groups of monochromatic thinking, preventing the most powerful expressions of God’s love from happening in the tension of Truth.
Put another way, we cluster with people only like ourselves and suffer from the lack of diversity of thinking, which removes spaces where God’s love could be most powerfully demonstrated and experienced.
And this is killing not only the Church, but our nation, states, and cities as well.
However I am more convinced than ever that the Church can become one the places where this false divide can be overcome - because we allow the Author of Truth and His Holy Spirit to do His transforming work while we do the task we have been assigned: Loving one another with God’s love.
I am an idealist, for sure, but God’s power and beauty call me forward and I cannot quit on this idea.
Here are a few guiding principles that might help us get started:
Life is messy and human identity is incredibly complex. No one gets a pass on the challenging complexities of the human soul (psyche) and its quest to know and be known, in love, by God and man.
Love is the only unstoppable force on the earth. It simply cannot be stopped, legislated away, or defeated. Love is power. It is power that makes no effort to control its recipient, so it cannot stop evil from being evil and it will frequently be punished. Yet it is the greatest power in all of creation.
We are responsible TO each other, but not FOR each other. Change is a personal responsibility issue and it is God’s zone of governance, not ours.
The Church consists of the people of God who are working out their own salvation while they love God and seek to live in total submission to the authority of King Jesus and the Word of God. We are beggars, telling other beggars where we have found the bread of life. Our job is edification, exhortation, and comfort while we personally live in unbending submission as slaves of God.
Our decision to love and live this way will not prevent some from labeling us as narrow-minded, judgemental, or even hateful - but those accusations simply will not be true and we can rest in the reality and power of Love, knowing that God is pleased with us and that He will take it from there to do His best work.
May the Lord help us!!