Love is a word that gets thrown around a lot.
I love ice cream. I
love my new car. I love that TV
show. I love your shoes.
We use the word “love” in this superficial sense far too
often.
Most commonly the word “love” gets used as an emotion. But the deeper meaning of love is not
something you feel toward another person or something, but rather love is an
action.
Love is doing anything to care for any person in need.
If I’ve learned anything about love, it’s that love is
messy. Loving other people is
complicated, difficult, complex, problematic, challenging, demanding, tough, and
risky. Just really messy.
There are a lot of people in this world who need to be
loved. There is a lot of pain, a lot of
suffering, a lot of hurting people in our communities.
Trying to love people can be exhausting in every way
possible- physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
Figuring out how and who to love keeps me up at night.
How can I possibly love everyone who needs to be loved? How does one prioritize who needs to be
loved?
How can I love people while making sure I’m not taken
advantage of or I don’t completely exhaust myself?
When is “tough” love what is really needed?
How do I make sure that what I’m doing for someone is
actually showing them love and not just hurting them more?
What if not everyone agrees with the way I think love should
be shown to people? Do I risk destroying
a relationship with someone so that someone else can be loved?
I think and pray hard and long trying to figure out how to
love. I have made mistakes when I
thought I was doing or saying the right thing but really I wasn’t. I have hurt people who I only intended to
love. I haven’t and won’t love
perfectly. My past mistakes and my fear
of doing something wrong in the future, my fear of not loving enough or of
loving too much or loving the wrong way, tempts me to give up. Am I or anyone else really making any
progress in caring for people in need?
Is it really worth it???
I get caught up in this thinking far too easily. I have to remind myself again and again that
all I can do is try as hard as I can to love people in the right way with the
knowledge and resources I have right now.
And I pray that God will pick up the pieces, that somehow God will use
my imperfect, failed attempts at loving people and will transform those attempts
into something more beautiful than I could ever imagine. This is love.
33 years ago today, a man who understood perfectly what it
means to love, a man who lived and died loving other people, Archbishop of San
Salvador Oscar Romero, became a martyr.
The prayer below, Prophets of a
Future Not Our Own, often called the “Romero Prayer”, has been one of those
things that helps remind me that love is worth it and that God is entering in and transforming the world.
PROPHETS OF A FUTURE NOT OUR OWN
by Fr. Ken Untener
It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the
magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies
beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings
wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold
future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our
capabilities.
We cannot do everything,
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the
rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
