Loving people is so often just an abstract term. When the world talks about loving people, it’s talking about a feeling, a sensation that comes and goes, like pixie dust in fairy land. Jesus gives us a different understanding of love as a verb—something that we’re supposed to do. And as Christians, we talk about love and preach about love and pray about love. We title books after love—Love Does or Crazy Love. We write clichés with it at the center—True Love Waits or Love Came Down.The premise goes like this—Jesus loved people so we should love people. This is an good and accurate sentiment, but more often than not, it stops there. It’s just a sentiment, something we desire to do but don’t always get around to when our lives get in the way or our schedules get tight.
This past year, I had a job that pushed me past mere sentiments or abstractions of love into the nitty gritty verb itself. I was a Community Leader (Baylor’s version of an RA) in Penland Hall, the freshman men’s dorm.
Being a CL in Penland meant a lot of things. It meant late nights with the on-call phone responding to the various calamities that 18 year old guys create. It meant another year of community showers and cramped living quarters. It meant 95% of my social life revolved around freshmen. I showed up in early August at CL staff training and heard my job description. It came in a binder and had small font and big words but it basically stated this: Here are your thirty residents on your hall. Care about them. Get to know them. Love them well.
I dove head-first into that job. I cut out other time commitments, spent less time with old friends, went on hardly any dates, and took the bare minimum of class hours. I tried to do whatever I could do to really, actually, truly love the guys in Penland. I tried to dive into loving people as a full-time profession, into a nitty, gritty type of love that is present and real and tangible.
I don’t want this year to sound like some pious, disciplined quest. Work consisted of Whataburger runs, late night bro-talks, playing ball at the SLC, and Bible studies over breakfast burritos in the Penland dining hall. It didn’t allow for much time for anything else, but it was a blast. I also don’t want to paint myself some sort of a hero, because I messed up a lot. At times, I approached relationships in Penland as a job rather than a joy and an opportunity. Other times, I’d get sick of the place and disappear for long stretches. When that happened, the only thing that would bring me back was the very source of love, the Good News of Jesus.
Jesus’s love, His willingness to go to the Cross, to hang there and die for our sins—is not abstract. It is actual. It is incarnational. It is real. When we take communion, we remind ourselves of that. The bread His body, the wine His blood, His love is tangible. This Jesus is our picture of what love looks like. The Cross, the example of the lengths His love went to, is our fuel. With this picture and this fuel, our love moves past sentiment and abstraction into reality.
If we claim to follow Jesus, the question that should never be far from our minds is this—are we loving people like He did?
Is our love for others tangible, present, and real?
I hope so.
Love Came Down 