I Love You

Hey.

I love you.

I have something I really want to get off my chest, OK?

I love you.

I know it may sound all melodramatic, but I honestly mean it. I'm not throwing it around loosely, I'm not "just saying it," and I'm not trying to say it to elicit some response from you, I'm just telling you a thing that is, much in the same way that I would tell you "It is raining," or perhaps, "There are Oreos in the kitchen," or even, "There were Oreos in the kitchen."

I love you.

I know some people are weird about saying that, hearing that, showing that, feeling that... I know. And if you're one of those people who has a hard time being on the receiving end of those particularly dangerous 8 letters, two spaces and one period, then I sincerely apologize for any discomfort I may have caused, it was certainly not my intent. After all...

I love you.

And it is in fact because I love you that I want to talk to you. I ain't gonna lie to you, yes, I want to talk about God. But what I really want is to talk to YOU... about God.

I love you.

I want to know you. I want to share in your joys and your sorrows. I want to know your victories and your defeats. I want to know what it is in your life that makes you smile so big your cheeks and ears get real well acquainted, but I also want to know what you're seeing in your life that breaks your heart just a little more each day.

I love you.

I was always told in my English classes that, in writing, one is never to call attention to the act itself of reading, or to make the reader aware that he or she is reading, or whatever it was. I didn't really pay attention anyway because I think the rule is, frankly, stupid. I know that it's meant to keep things sounding professional or maintaining an academic distance or some junk like that, but I don't write things just so they'll be written down, I write things so they will be read. Sometimes I'm the only guy who ever reads it. Sometimes I only read it when I write it and then never see it again because somebody else reads it before setting it on fire in a fitful rage along with what I'm pretty sure was my copy of Wolverine #36. But the point is, no matter what I write, I write it because I want somebody to read it. Right now, the person I want to be reading what I'm writing is you, the person with the eyes passing over these words right now. I really want you to understand something.

I love you.

And here's the thing... I know who you are. Obviously, I can't write your name right here, but I do know who you are. Call it my mutant power if you must, but I've got this sort of psychic connection to my blog posts. I can always tell if somebody is reading this. Don't believe me? Call me up, right now, and ask me just how I could possibly know you're reading this. The answer will surprise you, but there's a reason it works:

I love you.

I can't stress enough how important it is that you know that I love you. I want you to know that I love you - that I genuinely love you - enough that I want to go out of my way to make your life better. I want to sacrifice my time, my money, my life for you to help you out. If I can simply make your day better... I want to. I want to do everything that I actually can to help you out in as many ways as I am possibly able.

I love you.

I know that there are people out there who would (and can and do and will) abuse that, but I seem to remember something about Jesus saying that if someone asks for our cloak, we give them our tunic. Or if someone asks us to go one mile, we go the second. Or if someone hits us, we turn the other cheek. I know that's a really hard concept to get since we don't wear cloaks or tunics, we don't have a lot of people coming up and asking us to go one mile, and we don't really spend a lot of time turning our cheeks, but what I think He was saying is that if we love people, we'll let them take up some of our time, or we'll let them inconvenience us, or we'll even let them do us flat out wrong. It's a hard lesson to learn, yeah, but it's an important one.

I love you.

I also think it's one we've kinda missed out on.

I love you.

I think something happened somewhere along the way in the history of Christianity where we decided that it was OK to love everybody we could so long as it was easy to love them.

I love you.

We decided that it was OK if we kept our love for our fellow man in tidy little envelopes that went to people a continent away.

I love you.

When I was in Dallas a month or so back, I was riding around with Corwin and his wife on our way to Plano for dinner with friends. I don't really know much about big city Texas geography, so I don't have any idea what road it was, but it came time for us to exit onto some road off of some road, and that's where the traffic slowed to a crawl. As we went up the ramp - which was a pretty steep up at a pretty sharp right - we saw the problem: two girls were in a car that had broken down just about in the middle of the lane.

I love you.

The traffic was not just slow, it was thick and only getting thicker. This particular exit came right after the on-ramp from another two busy roads, and this exit itself was a fairly popular one. These girls had apparently been here for at least a few minutes, and even in the minute or so that it took for us to get to them, there had been easily dozens of people to drive around these girls.

I love you.

Once we got around and pulled over well out of traffic, Corwin and I got out of the car and helped push these girls further to the shoulder so they'd at least be out of traffic. Whatever the problem was with their car, it was beyond mine and Corwin's capacity to fix, or even to diagnose. (Not that my "car smarts" is anything to brag about... If it gets much more complicated than a stuck seatbelt or a kinda smudgy windshield, I don't know.)

I love you.

We didn't do it for the girls' thanks, and we didn't really do it to help free up traffic. We did it for those two girls. They were having a pretty rough time there. We wanted to help, just because it's the right thing to do. Because it's love.

I love you.

But the real question isn't why Corwin and I decided to stop and help two girls on the side of the road in the middle of the labyrinthian concrete of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex interstate system, it's why we were the ones who had to decide.

I love you.

These girls had been stuck in that exit ramp long enough that traffic behind them for at least a full mile in more than one direction had slowed down considerably. It wasn't quite to a halt or anything, but 20 on the interstate is slow no matter where you are, and in Dallas, anything under 55 MPH is a house.

I love you.

Surely there had been at least one other Christian to pass those girls. Surely Corwin and I were not the first two guys big enough to get that job done. They were driving a Corolla, not a Sherman tank. Corwin and I were glad to serve, even if for no other reason than the simple fact that God pretty specifically says "If you do nice things for strangers, if you help out people who could really use some help, I'll let you go to Heaven forever." But we were both just dumbfounded by how many people had gone by these girls and yet did nothing more than slow down long enough to avoid exchanging insurance information with anybody.

I love you.

And you know, it's not even just that our interactions with complete strangers have deteriorated to the point that people will allow someone to literally be stuck on the side of the road when it would take the briefest of interruptions to their day that has me the most grieved. It's that we're to the point where we do that in our churches, too.

I love you.

I'm not saying that there isn't any love in our churches these days, because there certainly is. But when one of the ten largest churches of Christ in the world is in the same county as one of the most crystal-meth addled populations in the world, something is wrong.

I love you.

If we're really doing what we were called to do, wouldn't we be making SOME difference in people's lives? The early church sold all of their possessions to support each other in the name of their Christ-centered love for each other. Do we even really talk to people in our churches anymore? Do we really connect to the people in the pew in front of us, or across the aisle, or way back in the back? As quickly as people will point fingers of blame and pronounce scriptures of shame on other churches, have we ever really considered that maybe the problem is just us?

I love you.

Maybe we're the reason the world is so messed up these days. Maybe we gave up. Maybe we decided that the world wasn't worth saving, that the church wasn't worth loving, that the people we encounter every day in our lives outside of the sanctity of our homes weren't worth reaching out to in simple truth and love.

I love you.

I don't know how much more clear it can be than this: the entire point - for all the theology and doctrine and dogma - of Christianity is simply that we Love God and Love Others. That's it.

I love you.

And I don't want to say that all I see is failure, because that's certainly not the case. Love is everywhere. But it's not really in the churches the way I would like to see it.

I love you.

I want to see a church that is centered around love to the point that each member is willing to break down that barrier of personal secrecy and allow someone else into their lives. I want to see a church that is filled with people who know each other well enough to instinctively know when something's wrong. I want to see a church filled with people who are ALL close to the preacher, who are ALL intimately connected with the church leadership, who are ALL indispensable members of the body of Christ.

I love you.

I guess what I really just want to see is a return to a church - like the church of the first century, the church of the apostles, the church of the New Testament - that is completely focused on love for others to the point that people are willing to die for the simple truth of God's Love for us. I want to see a church that doesn't just keep telling the world over and over and over that God loves them, or even that we love them, but instead gets out there and SHOWS IT by DOING IT. I want to see a church that loves the world around it and shows them the meaning of the Truth - God's Truth - that we are not perfect people, but we are people who follow a perfect God, who perfectly loves us, and wants us to show everyone around us that we love them in the same way, for the same reason, that He loves us in the first place.

I love you.

Let's get past just telling the world we love them. Let's get past just telling the church that we love them. Let's actually sit down with people and encounter them where they live, where they work, where they play, where they exist, and get to know them on a level that might be a little uncomfortable, might be a little inconvenient, might be a little expensive, might be even a little scary... but it's right. It's love. It's what we're supposed to do. More than just saying it, we have to get out there and really become a part of people's lives on the level that lets them see that we are just as human as they are. That's they only way we can ever come close to fulfilling the mission of Christ in this world. It's the one job we've got. So let's get on it, huh?

I love you.

Really.