Love People, Love God

So I just got home from my 6 1/2 hour road trip to Jackson, Mississippi for my college orientation. There is a large pile of clothes on my bedroom floor waiting to be put away and it's nearly 10pm...and yet I'm sitting here, about to write a blog post. But I figure that I need to get my procrastinating out of my system before I go to college, because I really need to stop procrastinating once I get there, because I'll be SUPER busy.
-taye

Love One Another

"Do you know that nothing you do in this life will ever matter, unless it is about loving God and loving the people he has made?"
{Francis Chan, Crazy Love}

As I said previously, I have just been to my college orientation. The school I am going to this fall is a small, private, Christian University, and there are people from all over the country who go there; the incoming freshman class is no exception. My roommate is from Pennsylvania, and over the weekend I met people from Arizona, Arkansas, Texas, and many other states. It is very interesting to see how different all of these people are from me- the small-town, homeschooled, southern girl from Georgia.

"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another."
{John 13:34}

Love people. At first, this sounds like it would be a pretty simple task to accomplish. But then Jesus threw in a twist: to love others like HE loves them. Now I was with you when you first thought Hey, this will be fine. I'll just love the people who love me: easy enough. But people don't always love you; they may love you for a short time, but human love is subject to alteration. God doesn't just love the people who love Him, if He did, John 3:16 would be way off track. If God only loved those who consistently love Him, those who receive God's love would be very, very few. But thankfully, that isn't the way He works. God loves everyone. Everyone? Yes, I said everyone. That means the homeless man you pass on the highway. It means the Starbucks worker you see every week. It means your biology teacher who gets on your nerves. It means your parents, even when you can't understand them. It means your best friend, your aunts and uncles, your brothers and sisters, the lady who messed up your lunch order, the guy picking up trash on the side of the road, the mailman, the strange quiet girl in your math class, the clingy girl with the obnoxious laugh, the annoying guy who constantly texts you, the old woman driving 20 miles under the speed limit in front of you . . . Every single person that is living and breathing on the planet earth. God loves them and Jesus died on the cross to become sin for them, and now He comes along in John 13:34 and tells us that just as He loves every single one of them we are to love every single one of them as well.

That is a hard thing for me to grasp, and it's one of God's commands that part of me just wants to walk away from and forget about. But the more diverse the people I meet, the more this command pops up in my head, and it's something I know I cannot refuse. So I challenge you to strive with me to love every person you come into contact with: the guy whose cussing keeps offending me, the girl who acts a little differently than me, the cashier at the grocery store, the biker sitting near me at Starbucks, and especially my friends and family.