August 7
Beloved of Good Shepherd Church,
Grace to you and peace in Jesus Christ our Lord!
Love properly applied will challenge you. That is, when the love of Jesus gets loose inside of you it should challenge the way you typically approach your life and the people in it. Jesus’ love de-centers us from our focus on ourselves and repositions us to get curious and compassionate about and toward other people.
Love also comforts. Jesus accepts you and loves you exactly as you are right this second no matter the things you’ve done and left undone. That is a great comfort to all of us who sometimes stumble and come up short and for those of us who have regrets about the past. When she brought up her sins and those of others Jesus said to Julian of Norwich, “Sin is inevitable, yet all will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well.”
Love welcomes. Over and over again in the Gospels Jesus welcomes people whom others dismiss. The love of Jesus takes the doors off the hinges and throws open the arms of God’s oceanic welcome to all who come His way.
Love offers peace. Many of us have lived at some point in our lives with a great storminess in our chests. There is a turbulence inside us born of a long relationship with stress and anxiety. Try as we might, we can't calm the storm. At our wits end we do what we probably should have done at the start, we surrender. We turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. Then we take up a spiritual practice to which we devote ourselves daily. And after a time, the storm subsides and gives way to peace. The love of Jesus grants us a peaceful inner life.
Love challenges, comforts, welcomes, and offers us peace.
I often say to people who are looking for a church home, I will pray that you find a church in which you feel welcomed, comforted, challenged, and peaceful. When you find those things whether it is with us at Good Shepherd or at some other church you can be assured that you have most likely found your spiritual home.
Love properly applied and allowed to work in to challenge, comfort, welcome, and offer peace will cause an inner transformation in you. The transformation will bloom inside of you and cause you to have an outward response to the inner change. This outward response is commonly referred to as outreach. Outreach is an outward response to the inner transformation caused by your encounter with the love of Jesus.
Community outreach is an outward response focused on helping people in need, particularly people who are experiencing some form of poverty. But outreach is not limited to charitable acts. Outreach is any love-driven outward response to an inner transformation. Some people join the choir, sign up to teach Sunday school or volunteer to help the youth group, join the altar guild, or the pastoral care team, or become an usher, lector, or eucharistic minister. Outreach is service done in response to love’s transforming power in your life.
How is love changing you on the inside? How are you called to respond on the outside? There are a multitude of outreach opportunities at Good Shepherd. Which one is for you?
Remember this always - God loves you, and I love you too!
Love is all,
Hendree+