Love one another

Loving one another is a phrase we’ve heard our whole lives. In kindergarten we were told to treat each other how we’d want to be treated. In Sunday school we were taught to love our enemies as ourselves. Adults told us to love our neighbor and so on. Even if you never experienced one of those particular situations I bet you’ve probably heard or experienced similar at some point in your life. Something I’ve noticed is that people love to say that we should love each other. It’s an easy and good thing to say. We feel confident in saying it and I’d say a good amount of us actually want to mean it. Loving the good people in our lives isn’t so bad. But something to remember is that we weren’t called to love just our friends, we were called to love everyone. And to be completely honest that’s really hard.

For Lent this year I’ve decided to do a devotional every day. I’ve tried to do this before but always end up making excuses so I made a 40 day promise to myself and to my faith to sit down for minimum 15 minutes a day and do a devo. Sometimes I find them through the Bible app, or I use books I have, or journal, etc. Anyway this week I’m doing a Bob Goff “love everybody always” 5 day devotional. It’s so great and I’ll link it at the bottom!Anyway Bob is honestly just the best and I always love what he has to say. He wrote “I’ve spent my whole life avoiding the people Jesus spent His whole life engaging. God’s idea isn’t that we would just give and receive love but that we could actually become love.” Good stuff right? And it got me thinking about how true this is. Because I’ve noticed sometimes the people who we want to avoid loving sometimes need it the most. I’ve struggled with this whole idea for a while and still honestly do. But when Bob says that we should become love, I think he pretty much summed it up perfectly. If we embody love, in our everyday lives, we are loving others. It’s a lifestyle we have to stay committed to. To me it means choosing faith over pressure to prove and forgiveness over pain. And it’s one of the best and hardest parts about being a Christian. 

A verse I love is 1 Peter 4:8 “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”  When we love each other we tear down sin. We take the evils and overpower them with Gods love. I think we all need to be a little bit nicer to each other. The world can be scary and hard, so why should we make it worse by tearing down others. We shouldn’t be in constant competition to prove we’re worthy of approval. You are no better than the person next to you and vice versa. When we believe that our love and acceptance comes from God, the pressure to fit in becomes less. When we embody love, I truly believe we can change lives and hearts. It’s not always easy and sometimes seemingly impossible. But there are so many people out there who have never been shown Gods love. And those are the people we tend to shy away from. But instead we have to stop hiding and start living. We need to embody love. We need to be kind to people. Smile at strangers, hold the door open for someone, give someone a compliment, take notice of those who are alone. We all deserve love and we all deserve to know who we are loved by. So let’s all agree to work on it. To be conscious in our thoughts and actions and to try our hardest to embody the love God gives to us. Will we mess up? For sure. And that’s ok. We all struggle and go through deep waters but it’s the reminder of how loved we are that will keep us afloat. So let’s all agree to smile a little bigger, think a little harder, and love a lot bigger. Let’s agree to simply love one another.

All the love, Annie 

P.S – sorry it has been forever since I’ve written. Life gets crazy. Thanks for sticking with me 🙂

The link to “love everybody always” devotional :

http://bible.com/r/2zf