- C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy
If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For
even sinners love those who love them. And
if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For
even sinners do the same.
- Luke 6:32-33 (English Standard Version)
Loving people is hard.
I remember a particularly difficult time with a friend at university,
where she was working through deep wounds in her own life by trying to control
her other relationships (like ours) in unhealthy ways. Our friendship turned into a series of
painful conversations and very high relational stress. During that time, my desire to love her
didn't waver, but my determination to act on that love certainly
did. I was tired, and bruised, and all my
efforts seemed futile anyway.
I remember praying daily that God would help me to show his love to
her. It was only towards the end of that
season, though, that I realized: I had not been asking God to help me love her
better. I had been asking him to make
loving her easy. I was hoping for—maybe
even expecting—some sort of beatific wellspring to appear me, which would make
it effortless to be kind and patient and encouraging. I didn't want to be frustrated and hurt and
choose to speak gently anyway; I wanted speaking gently to be the only thing
that even occurred to me. I wanted
goodness to flow out of me unbidden.
Since then, I have discovered that attitude creeping up elsewhere: I
want loving people to be easy, I want trusting God in impossible-seeming
situations to be easy, I want breaking deeply-rooted cycles of sin to be easy...
Yes, I believe that as we grow in faith and our hearts become more
closely aligned with Christ, that these things get easier. But easier isn't easy.
On my very first day of Russian class, I was expected to say
"zdravstvuitye." Ha. Right.
(Seriously, what kind of language puts that many consecutive consonants
in the word "hello"?) A few
months of class, and Russian was "easier," too. I could whip out zdravstvuityes without even
thinking. The horribly complicated
system of word-endings necessary in order to say "I live in a house"
instead of "the house lives on me," however? Again, ha.
And again, a few months later that concept was easy and the next thing
was hard.
I'm willing to put in the work and suffer the frustration to learn
Russian grammatical systems (yes, I'm weird), yet when it comes to spiritual
matters I expect to grow without effort.
I want magically to skip right from wherever I am to perfectly
virtuous.
…It's a hard thing for me to understand, how the completeness of God's
work and my own efforts intertwine. I am
continuing to learn how God's power is made perfect in weakness, and how
securely I can rest in his grace, and how trying to do and grow in my own
strength is different from doing and growing in God's strength. I do know, however, that we are not promised anywhere
that loving people or trusting God or struggling against sin will be easy; in
this broken world, those things will be hard. We are promised help, and comfort, and hope,
and sustenance, and strength, and power, and mercy...but not ease.
Loving that friend in college was not easy at the time. Maybe now, years later, if I went back as my current self and faced it again, it would be easier. I'm pretty sure it would be, actually. But it doesn't work like that. Now I'm faced with now--the people and situations and struggles of today. They're still hard. Indeed, I have the distinct (sometimes sinking) feeling that that "really hard" time was
just a zdravstvuitye in my life. It will only keep getting harder. Yet, perhaps weirdly, I'm convinced it will keep getting better, too.
Here comes North Carolina. Praise God that he remembers that we are dust.
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