Love Like JesusSample

Loving Like Jesus IS Loving Jesus

When my family started fostering, we attended a Christmas party for foster families given by a church we'd never visited in a denomination we didn’t belong to. I ended up spending the whole two hours choking back tears and trying to keep myself composed. Everywhere I looked I just kept catching glimpses of the face of Jesus in the crowd.

Before we even walked in with our kids, we ran into the friend who invited us in the parking lot. There He was on her arm all snugged up in an infant carrier as a little girl born addicted to meth, cocaine, Xanax, and some other drug I can't recall. He was there again just inside the door—a whole swarm of volunteers warmly greeting us and scrambling to offer us full stockings and name tags instead of using their Saturday before Christmas to shop and run errands. Then He was there behind us. A mom, a dad, and no I'm not kidding, six school-aged foster kids. Most with thick glasses or leg braces on and all with clean clothes and contented smiles. He was a redhead who proudly showed me the Lego set he was given by some nameless, un-thanked church member. And He was both the dad who gingerly wiped saliva off of a wheelchair-bound boy, and the boy who could only respond by turning His newly dried face to look into the dad’s eyes. And He was the chatty woman with a big, healthy baby on her hip and He was also the toddler dangling from her legs. And an older woman signing to two little boys with cochlear implants over one ear. And a sweet grandpa with a Santa hat who led a carol sing-along with Rudolph and Jingle Bells thrown in to put the kids at ease. And driving home with my trunk full of donated groceries and presents, I realized He was the two little sisters who returned home with us that night. He was even my family too. We were being Jesus and loving Jesus all at the same time. Jesus was just everywhere I looked. In the loving and the loved.

In today’s passage, Paul beckons the Church to live in a way that this party exemplified. That there be equality. That we’re all in this together. Not just His hands and feet, but sometimes His face. His tangible, observable body. But unless we allow ourselves to get chin-deep in the sorrow, and need, and pain, and poverty, and brokenness, and loneliness, we won't feel it. And things like the kids in your community spending Christmas without a family won't even break your heart because you won't know any of their names. And until you look into their eyes, you'll never know the joy of seeing Jesus Christ face to face on this side of heaven.

It's worth it though. He is unimaginably, breathtakingly beautiful. He is awesome and majestic and glorious and radiant. And it's more than enough reason to love like Jesus—with everything in us.

Kendra Golden
Life.Church Creative Media Team