People need you. Need me. They may need a prayer, a visit, an open door to presence. They may just need to know their lives matter to us. Do they know the ways in which we are there for them? Do they know we love them?
Of course sometimes, maybe more than just sometimes, we choose to be absent. And those times of absence can be a gift, a grace. Those sabbath times away from those who need us can feed availability, can nourish the times we reach out. Ministers, nurses, mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and teachers—helping people especially need those times of absence. Christian and other spiritually oriented people may in particular need absence. The sabbath is, after all, commanded, not just suggested.
Jesus wasn’t always there when needed. Mary and Martha needed Him to be with them when their brother Lazarus died. And those two ladies let Jesus know in no uncertain terms that they didn’t appreciate the delay of His arrival. Just as you and I sometimes let God know we don’t appreciate God’s absence just when we need Him or Her most. Or at least when we think we need God most.
But the question haunts me, the question of whether those around us know we are there, that we love them.
Bob Goss wrote a wonderful little book, Love Does, concerning the active quality of love. Our caring for others doesn’t just sit there, or feel, or say “…thinking about you.” James asks how in blazes it helps if we say for someone to be warmed and fed but don’t offer a blanket or a bite to eat (Jas 2:16.) Love does, indeed, get up and do stuff in the service of God, ourselves, and others. Jesus did, in fact, join Mary and Martha in their grief and then loved Lazarus right up out of his grave and into life again.
And of course, regardless of what we do, people sometimes resist, don’t accept or even respect the love we have to offer. They may not want our love because we’re the wrong race, we don’t vote like others think we should, we don’t have an acceptable sexual orientation, don’t attend an approved church, or maybe we just fail to be all things to all people that we might make love known (1 Cor 9:22.)
But what of the times that even those closest to us don’t know our love for them, the ways we are there for them, small though those ways might be?
Norman Maclean’s book, A River Runs through It, and the movie based on that book, represent a profound statement about love for life, God, and family. It is the story of a Presbyterian minister’s family in Missoula, Montana early in the twentieth century. The father, Rev Maclean, says in a sermon not long before his death, “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.” He then indicated, with thinly veiled reference to his son Paul who had died tragically, that we often find it difficult to make our love effectively known. “But,” he says wistfully, “We can still love them. We can love them completely, without complete understanding.”
It is good that we know we are loved; and it is beautiful when those we live with know they are loved. Just as it is good that you and I know, and trust deeply, that we are loved by God in Jesus Christ. It is good to be beloved and to know our belovedness by God and others. As Henri Nouwen once said, “Being the beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.”
And yet before God ever does love, before creation, before sending Jesus Christ in the flesh around 4BC, before the teaching and cross and resurrection and presence of the Holy Spirit, God is love (1 Jn 4:8.)
And maybe if we become people of love, if you and I become love, if over the course of a lifetime love becomes who we are as love is who God is, then out of our hearts might flow rivers of the life giving waters and blankets and food and presence and prayers and gifts of love that does stuff. If we can ever look at children and adults, rich and poor, male and female, immigrant and native, religious and atheist, gay and straight, Jew and Greek—if we can ever see people and life and ourselves as beloved, then we might know what it means to “…be imitators of God, as beloved children…” (Eph 5:1.)
And then they will know….
