Light of Love

I am sitting here in front of the computer, still in my pajamas, enjoying a plate of potatoes. To be exact, a potato cut in half and about a quarter of the insides scooped out, fried, filled in with cheese, sprinkled with some salt, and melted. Amazing. (Seems like the only things I'm good at cooking are eggs and potatoes.. This needs to change.)

These few days I've been pretty irritated by someone who just goes around telling everyone off, as if everything should be done her way to benefit her. Its like she criticizes others and tries to correct their attitudes without realising that block of wood in her own eye. I'm sure we've all met with that kind of person before, or even actually been that kind of person (I know I have) - and they are so hard to love. I talked, angered, ranted, repented, threw my hands up in disgust, ranted, repented, to my Father about this. Not just talking about the-one-so-hard-to-love but also talking about myself, and how deep down, I knew that I actually didn't want to choose to love her. Wrestling with the fact that the love I give out is actually a choice to look beyond all imperfections and irritations, and how I wanted to love her but at the same time I didn't want to surrender my disappointments (I wanted revenge actually, sorry! That's the old nature for you. Its no wonder Paul always wrote letters to the churches telling them to cast off the old nature and put on Christ.) to God. Like a child that doesn't want to share his favourite toy train with anyone else, I didn't want to surrender my irritations because I wanted to use it to play around with and cause hurt to the other person.

Finally, exhausted, slightly more mellowed out but still frustrated... I sat still and listened.

Hannah, you pray and you ask Me to make you more and more like Me. You pray and say that you want to learn to love like how I love, and live the way I live. But now..

Oh.

.. But now when the unlovable comes, are you going to love like Me, or were those prayers just for show?

Oh.

Ouch.

That was a wake-up call, a much-needed rap on the knuckles from Heaven. But so much truth in it. We pray and we plead and we cry out in desperation for God to change us, for God to mold us to be like Him, for God to teach us to love everyone like How he does. However when people who are the epitome of unlovable cross out paths, we get angry and judgmental and yell to God about how He could bring such people into our lives. We expect to be able to love just like Jesus because we pray for it, but when He throws us into the arena of life, we fail miserably.

Because we preach without practising, and we don't even realise it. Faith without works is dead.