You might think loving God should be the easy part of faith, but as you discover in your spiritual journey, it’s far more complex than it initially appears. When God asks you to love, you’re being called to love not just the divine but every person, every creature, every blade of grass that carries the spark of God within it. This includes loving those who think completely opposite from you, those who challenge your beliefs, and even those within your own faith community during moments of disagreement and conflict.
The challenge intensifies when you realize that everyone brings their own understanding of what love looks like based on how they learned to love growing up. You might have been taught that love means eating whatever food is placed before you as a sign of respect, while someone else learned that love means being honest about your preferences. These different love languages create opportunities for misunderstanding within your spiritual community, especially during difficult conversations and decision-making processes.
“We need to be able to share our love language, our understanding of what love looks like. And we need to be able to recognize that just because that doesn’t mean look like love to me doesn’t mean that that isn’t love to that person.”
Your call is to recognize that when you open yourself to understanding how each person around you has learned to love, accepting their heartbroken love, their frustrated love, even their angry love, you are collectively loving God with all your hearts, minds, strength, and soul.
This sacred work of communal love becomes the foundation for transforming the world beyond your church doors, showing others what it truly means to love God through the radical act of loving each other in all your beautiful, messy humanity.
