Caring part 3
I think the right order (for everything) is found in 1 John 4:19, "We love him, because he first loved us." And, remember, we love Him BY loving each other. But what I'm trying to say is... you have to receive it before you can release it. Even though, in a sense, we receive it BY releasing it. Because you can't give what you don't have. And you can only give what you do have. That's why hurt people hurt people. Because all they have is hurt. But, in the same way, healed people heal people. Loved people love people. So, yesterday, I spent a bit of time talking about casting our cares on Him. That's important. Because you don't want to get crushed under the weight of the world. Or the weight of YOUR world. Its not good for us to be alone, right? Its important to bear each others burdens. And that, by the way, is HOW we cast our cares on HIM. By sharing them with each other. By letting others help us. "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall" (Proverbs 16:18). Right? So many times we just try to do it all ourselves and we fall woefully short. Because we can't--and we aren't supposed to--do it all ourselves. Every time God called someone to do something in the Bible, He equipped and empowered them to do what He wanted them to do. And in some cases, it was by giving them the right people to do it with. Moses and his brother Aaron, for example. Or when they held Moses' arms up for him. Just off the top of my head. My point is, we need each other. We need to help each other... and we need to let people help us. Its not a one-way street. We love because He first loved us. We can help because He first helped us. We care about each other... because He cared about us first. That's why we CAN cast our cares on Him; because He cares for us. We're not just banging our heads against the wall, and getting nothing to show for it but a headache. We're connected with people that genuinely care for us. That, by the way, is called family. And, as Logan puts it, your friends are the family that you pick. A support system. Roots. Relationship. That's what life is all about. That's what life IS. To live is to love and to love is to live. So you can't truly live--you can't experience Jesus' eternal, everlasting, abundant, Resurrection Life--without loving people. That's what Jesus' life IS; its a life of love. Being loved by God and loving people with that same love. Not thinking you're up here and they're down there. But getting down there with them and loving them right where they are. Like Jesus getting down on hands and knees to wash the disciples' feet. He did what needed to be done. Because He cared about them. Because He loved them. So many times we reject love because we think we don't deserve it. Because we think all the "bad stuff" we've done has disqualified us. Or we think the things we don't like about ourselves are things that NOBODY could like. So we close our hearts down. We don't let people care about us, and we stop caring about other people. But I'm telling you, that's no way to live. Guarding your heart means keeping it OPEN. Open to love. Open to those connections and those relationships. So, first thing first, we need to let God love us. We need to know that He cares. THEN we can love each other and care for each other!