A New Commandment I give you...

I was listening to my car MP3 tunes this morning, and this came on. "A New Commandment I give you; Love one another as I have loved you..." I have heard this countless times but this time something in me clicked which helped me understand my experience in the last few years: People don't want to be loved. They want you to be useful to them. When you are no longer useful to most people you will have few or no friends. At that time those who remain will truly be your friends.

If you are a true to Christ Christian, and you try to, grow to, love others as Christ loves you this truth will hit home not academically but with life. Perhaps God will drive you to seek and love those who feel they do not deserved to be loved. One of those places is where Mother Teresa had been.

So do people want to be loved? Yes, but only from the few that matter to them. This is usually the family and very few close friends. Many people if they lose their loved ones, they count on God to be reunited to their loss some day. That desire is much stronger than their yearning for God. As for loving God, he is THE ULTIMATE Santa Claus. Their spoken wishes disappear faster than evaporating vapours, but on Facebook and blogs, they are carved on servers and indexed by search engines forever. We have deviously developed ways to hide Santa God from ourselves. To compound the sin, we have too many people to affirm that we are OK. Meanwhile God is just tolerating us, giving us plenty of time to repent. Mysteriously in this way, he is more glorified. It is the shame of the Cross that eventually brings the glory. Indeed, "Forgive them Father for they do not know what they are doing".

"Do not know what they are doing" does not mean "Is not responsible" though.