Loving the Least of These

Last weekend I went to Winterfest, which is one of my favorite youth group events and during the 8 hour drive down I finished reading Red Letters by Tom Davis, and if you haven't read it, I strongly suggest it, especially if you are a fan of Irrisistible Revolution. It's one of those books you just can't seem to put down. Throughout the book, I found myself smiling at the hope it brought, cringing at my own selfishness and becoming furious at the way the world looks when it comes to poverty, and the AIDS crisis, and of course, it made me cry, a lot. It is a true, knock-you-to-your-knees book. There are a lot of lessons to be learned in that book, through looking at the church and its responsibility to care for all the orphaned children in our world, and learning to love 'the least of these' as family, and not just thinking of them as a charity case.

One of the things that I've been learning lately, from this book and from Winterfest is what it really means to love my neighbor as myself. Now, I know that this is something that we are taught to do from a very, very young age, but what this actually looks like is different than what I've thought all these years, the real meaning is just now starting to sink in. I guess I always thought that loving my neighbor meant loving those that are close to me and the people that I care about, and I should love them, but I should also be loving those who are hurting, my enemies, and those who the rest of the world forgets about because they don't appear to be like the rest of us. But really deep down, they are just like us. They too, were created in God's image, just like me and you. So I guess we really do have a lot more in common with them than I thought. During one of the Saturday sessions at Winterfest, this all started sinking in when Jeff Walling talked about treating everyone we come in contact with as if they were Jesus. It kinda hit home when I realized that more often than I'd like to admit, I pass judgement on others just by appearance, instead I should be seeing Jesus in their eyes. I need to start seeing Jesus in the eyes of my enemies, the homeless, the hungry, the terrorist, the child molester, the prostitute, the jock, the teenage mom, or even the lonely kid at school, and treating them with the same love that Christ has shown me.

Sam