Love

Last night in our small group we were discussing what love is and what the Bible tells us it is. We looked at scripture we came up with many different questions and scenarios. Where it says, Love your neighbour, we asked what does that mean to love your neighbour. Who is your neighbour. Another question that we asked was how do we love God with all our mind, soul and strength? What does it mean when the Bible tells us that if someone takes something of yours, let him have it. Does that mean that if I stole your digital camera, you would just let me take it? Or would you wrestle me and take it back? Is that love? Where do you draw the line. Obviously God doesn't call us to be walked all over like a bunch of idiots. So how do we let someone walk. What does it mean to seek justice and not revenge?

There were many more questions that we came up with that I can't remember right now (I should've written them down). Anyway, if anyone wants to give their opinion on this subject, feel free to leave a comment.

I feel that to love others we must be willing to go the extra mile for them. Some examples are: helping someone move furniture into their new house; or taking care of someone's kids for a night; or just simply listening to someone who needs a friend. Now, it's all fine and good if we do these things, but is it really love if we do them with a bad attitude, or really can't stand the person but we'll do these actions anyway because God tells us to? I think to acquire true Godly love, we must do things for others with a willing heart and spirit. Not thinking about ourselves, but always have what's best for others in mind.

How do we love God with all our mind? This one was one of the trickiest questions we discussed. Does He mean to keep our thoughts pure. Does it mean we must always be thinking about Him. The thought that I had was that it is not necessarily thinking constantly about Him, but in everything you think or do, we must excercise discernment. We must constantly be conscious of what we are doing and thinking. We must be aware that what we are doing is Godly.

Who is your neighbour? We determined that our neighbour is everyone we meet or cross paths with. We must be loving toward everyone. To love our friends, we determined that a good way was to keep them accountable to actions in their lives. If a Christian brother or sister is blatently sinning, we should call them on it no matter the consequences. This is not an easy thing to do!

The whole 'let the person who took your thing, take it' was a hard one to wrap our minds around. We didn't really come up with an explaination as to what we should do in these circumstances. We toyed with the idea that if you see them do it, try to get it back nicely, but if you don't see them do it, don't accuse someone of doing it and don't try to hunt them down to get it back. Who know's what we should do?

Anyway, gotta get back to work. Thanks for reading my ramblings.

Where is God?

Sometimes in the midst of extremely difficult circumstances we get a feeling that God isn't listening to our prayers and our cries to Him. Of course we know that this isn't true, but it makes you wonder why He is not answering your prayer the way you want it to be answered.

For instance, this last week my youngest son, Benjamin, who is 7 months old today, has not been content at all to sleep in his crib at night. The only time he is content and able to sleep is in our arms and a lot of times it is only in our arms when we are sitting up, so it's not like we can always lay down with him. Over the last 7 nights sleep my wife and I have probably got a total of about 3 hours sleep each per night and even this sleep is not restful because it comes in pockets of half and hour to an hour at a time until Ben wakes up crying again. We've tried everything we can think of to help him. He's developed a severe rash on his forehead and behind his ears which irritate him with constant itches. We've put cream on it, flax oil on it, given him camomilla drops, and have him sleeping on a magnetic mat (which is supposed to help balance out the ions in your body and help you to feel less pain and be relaxed). We aren't sure what's caused it. The doctors tell me it's Exema (or however you spell it) which makes sense because I have Exema too and it's a genetic thing. Anyway, needless to say that my wife and I are extremely tired and irritable due to this challenging time.

We pray over and over every night for God to allow Ben to relax so that he could get sleep and we could get sleep. Time and time again we cry out to God and ask that He help us, but God never seems to answer our prayer. Why?

Maybe God is trying to teach us a lesson. What is the lesson that He wants us to learn? Maybe to pray without ceasing, knowing that God is still there. Maybe He wants to see how much faith we have in Him to see us through. Maybe He wants to teach us that even through our challenges, we still have a very fortunate situation because our children don't have any major illness that they will battle until they die (we are very blessed in that way). I don't know exactly what God is trying to teach us, but I do know that even though He doesn't feel like He's working in our situation, He is in complete control.

We just have to keep trusting in Him for strength to get through, knowing that He always know's what's best for us in the long run.

Please keep us in your prayers as this is a challenging time for us. Thank you,