Loving WellSample

Choose Your Path

It’s time to make a lifestyle of loving well practical. I find there are generally two paths to move us intentionally down the road to loving well. Each road is work, so you can grow in this fruit and see what you already possess.

Loving well is like leaking God's love inside you to those around you. The more you leak love, the more the souls around you are watered.

Path number one is to pick a person. This could be your spouse, a family member, child, friend, or co-worker of the same gender. You might want to pray about who this should be and talk it over with your spouse or spiritual mentor. Since each person is different, your strategy to love this person will be unique to them. I would encourage you to pray for them at least daily and ask God to give you ideas and strategies to love this one person really well. What I like about this strategy is as you move from person to person, you really do start to feel the Father’s heart toward each one and you begin to experience how unique God’s love is toward each of us—not just a global love, but a specific love. 

The second path to growing in love or to get better at loving well is to pick a fruit of the spirit that comes from love and practice it. You might want to pick joy, patience, longsuffering, gentleness, kindness, etc. When you pick this path, you are choosing to give this fruit on a daily basis as opportunities come up, or even better, create an opportunity. For example, be kind. What it means to be kind to your child who likes to be late for everything is different than being kind to a supervisor, friend, or your spouse. What I like about this intentional growing love is you get to practice daily in different ways with different people.

I also like the idea of being focused to give fruit away. This allows you look for more opportunities to give this love fruit away. In this practice, it’s like baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies every morning, and then all day your mission is to find someone to give the cookies to.