My friends have heard me say many times, “How can I love you through this?” It’s an uncomfortable question to hear for some people. This can present another layer of weirdness when the friend I’m addressing happens to be of the opposite sex and may not be used to hearing that question. So many folks limit “love” to romantic or sexual feelings for another person.. In fact, I’ve grown into love being something I throw around quite often. I feel love for people in my life–family and friends–and I want to communicate that feeling to them. It seems I may have started something among even my fellow GenXers because “love” is flying around everywhere!
“How can I love you through this?” encompasses a whole lot of questions.
How can I support you through this?
How can I care for you through this?
How can I meet some of your physical or practical needs while you’re going through this? (Sometimes “love” comes in a casserole dish or shows up behind a mower.)
ultimately
How can I be Jesus for you as you’re going through this?
My Christian friends understand that that last question is the heart of it all. My nontheist friends haven’t met the same Jesus I’ve met so might not have been shown what Jesus’ love looks like. They know what my love looks like, though. (I try to get it as close to Jesus’ love as humanly possible.) Jesus embodied all the spiritual gifts; unfortunately, mine aren’t as far-reaching. But how cool would it be to be able to touch someone who’s sick, injured, or otherwise impaired and be able to heal them!
When I ask that question–“How can I love you through this?”–there are any number of correct answers. These may include (but aren’t limited to):
“Pray for/with me.”
“Can you mow my lawn for me?” (This is usually hidden as a statement like, “My lawn is really overgrown” or “The HOA sent me a letter about my lawn, but I just can’t summon up the energy to take care of it.”)
“I could use a meal I don’t have to cook.” (Again, may take the form of “I haven’t been grocery shopping” or “I’m nearly out of food.”)
“I don’t know right now.” This can be an invitation to sit in silence with someone and listen to them share their heart.
Sometimes, the unspoken answer tells us that the person just needs someone to be present in silence or to listen, and that’s okay, too.
It’s love day. Valentine’s Day, 2022. We go all out, don’t we? We buy the cards, the flowers, the chocolates. Or, if you’re like a lot of the fellas I saw at the mall last night, you’re buying the jewelry and the chocolate chip cookie cake in sheer desperation. (Then there was the guy who I think was buying balloons, flowers, and chocolates for at least five different people.) Why do we save all the love-sharing for one day of the year?
I love how things come together. Yesterday in Bible study, we discussed Mark 4–the parable of the sower (or seeds, depending on how you want to look at it). Then this morning, this cartoon landed in my Instagram feed.
This cartoon of Jesus as the sower sowing love gives me a new perspective on the parable. Art by David Hayward (@NakedPastor and nakedpastor.com).
As David writes:
The sower just throws seed everywhere. Some land here and some land there. He just throws it indiscriminately all over the field and beyond its borders and on all kinds of surfaces and in all kinds of places.
Some places are receptive. Some are not.
Some places are dangerous. Some are not.
Some are hostile. Some are not.
The lover doesn’t care.
The lover sows love everywhere.
I like this idea of sowing love much better than the typically evangelistic idea of spreading the word of God in order to “save souls” (never mentioned in the text).
Growing up around avid gardeners, I know a little bit about how seed is spread. When you garden, it’s different. You till the soil and create neat little rows. You go along behind and drop seeds or plant a seedling, gently and lovingly covering it up or patting the soil around it just so. Then you water it. Being married to a lawn care specialist gives me a different perspective. While the grasses where we live are usually sodded, grass where we used to live is broadcasted. When my husband broadcasted grass seed after preparing the lawn, seed could go pretty much anywhere. It certainly wasn’t unusual for some to land on the sidewalk or driveway, only to be swept or blown into the yard.
Whether you’re a gardener sowing seeds carefully or a lawn care specialist broadcasting seed with a spreader or by hand, you don’t quit or stop when things happen. Click here to go to Mark 4, and this is from The Message. If weeds invade the garden, the farmer doesn’t quit gardening. She doesn’t leave the food to rot, nor does she decide not to garden the following year. Same with the lawn care specialist. So what if some seeds land on the driveway where they’d never come up? He doesn’t quit because of that; he gets the seeds into the yard and goes on to the next account.
The majority of times this passage is studied and discussed, participants are challenged to think of themselves as either soil or seeds. If we’re soil then we have to choose if we’re hard and unrelenting, rocky, thorny, or good. Of course, we all want to be good soil. Or maybe we’re seeds. We’re seeds that never even take root or seeds that have a burst of life then die quickly. Or perhaps we are seeds that grow well enough but allow thorns [worries] to choke out our joy. We want to be the robust, fruitful seeds, and that’s what we hope to be.
But what about the sower? We don’t often think about him. We are called to sow the Word in this parable. Now, you might be thinking, how in the world do I get from “Word” to “love”? In John 1, we read, “the Word was God.” In I John 4, “God is love.” It’s basic math. If Word=God and God=love, then Word=love.
The sower, Jesus, sows love. Sometimes it lands on hard hearts. These hearts want this love, but just aren’t ready for it. The little persistent voice questions, “What makes you think you deserve this?” The person lets that love go because they don’t think they’re worthy.
Sometimes, the love lands on hearts that are softened and so ready. There’s that moment–and it lasts for a little while. The heart blooms under the warmth of this love, but then somehow it gets convinced that they’re not receiving the love the right way–maybe because of someone else’s religious doctrines–and it withers.
Still other times the love lands on hearts that receive it happily and gratefully. It’s thriving and growing, but then worries creep in. “Is this for real?” “How can he love me like this?” “How do I love him?” “But what about that time in college when…?” The plaguing of their minds and anxieties, doubts about their intrinsic self-worth, keeps the love from blooming to its fullest and makes it hard for the person to sow love themself.
Then the love can also fall on richly fertile, receptive hearts. This is love that takes root and grows. In the parable, Mark tells us that it yields an abundant harvest. That love blooms in our hearts, fills our souls, and pours out of us. It liberates us from all that has been holding us bondage and all that keeps us from loving God, others, and ourselves.
Then something incredible happens. We become sowers ourselves. Now it’s on us to follow the Jesus Way and sow love into the hearts of others. Sometimes the love will fall on hard hearts. Sometimes it’ll get an immediate positive reception then wither. Other times it’ll start growing in someone and their worries and anxieties will choke it out. Then still other times, it’ll land, take root, and grow, and another sower will join us. No matter where the love lands, all we’re supposed to do is broadcast that love everywhere to everyone, season after season.
When I was in eighth grade, our English teacher had us watch Escape From Sobibor. Sobibor was a Nazi extermination camp in Poland that housed Russian POWs as well as Jews, Romanis, and others who the Third Reich deemed “undesirable.” To this day, I have no idea why our teacher had us watch this. It seems reasonable that it would have been an introduction to the Holocaust as a precursor to reading The Diary of Anne Frank, but it wasn’t, and we didn’t read it. What I do know is that it was my first exposure to the horrors that were the Holocaust and that led me to learning about this period of history, ultimately focusing on the psychological factors that would lead one seriously psychologically fucked up (not an actual diagnosis) dude to, in turn, convince millions of people that one people group was evil because they didn’t look like everyone else.
(*Side note*–In more recent studies on race in America, I’ve learned that the anti-Black laws of the Jim Crow era were considered to be “too extreme” by Nazi standards. Yes, the Nazis in the ’30s looked to America for guidance on how to oppress racial minorities but rejected some of what we were doing because it was too much.)
When Maus hit the news as the latest on the banned book list, I had to investigate this. I also resolved to read it, no matter what. Why? Because reading books outside of my usual preferences of genres and authors stretches my mind. Also, if someone is finding a book offensive enough to want to remove it from age-appropriate curricula, then I’m curious about what’s so bad about it.
Maus tells the story of the author’s parents’ experiences living as Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. The story bounces between the modern day as Artie, the author–Art Spiegelman–talks to his father and also deals with the frustrations of their relationship; and the past as Vladek tells his story and shares his memories with his son. The book is a graphic novel with Jews portrayed as mice, Nazis as cats, and Polish citizens as pigs. Y’all, I’d never read a graphic novel in my life before this one (stepping outside my preferred genre). The anthropomorphisms soften but don’t negate the impact of the story.
I don’t want to give spoilers, but it made me feel. Spiegelman conveys the hope, fear, uncertainty, and sadness his parents experienced as they tried to avoid arrest. His frustration with his aging father also comes through the pages as he grapples with the disparity in the situations between his own upbringing in modern day New York (well, modern in the mid 1980s) and his father’s life back in Poland in the ’30s and ’40s. This frustration comes to a head at the end of the book which left me angry and sad for Vladek, though I could also empathize with Artie’s frustrations over this emotional disconnect between father and son.
As the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board pointed out, there is partial nudity and profanity in the book, and given its subject matter, there are also several incidents of violence. Nothing in this book, however, can compare with watching dozens of nude women and children being gassed to death in a Sobibor gas chamber, nor can it compare with the portrayal of an SS soldier coldly shooting a Jewish mother and her newborn infant, also in Escape From Sobibor. If books and movies lead us to pursue their subject matters–especially history–and that pursuit of knowledge further leads us to learn things like white supremacy is evil and how propaganda works, then there is no explicit threat in these materials. The only reason people have problems with teenagers learning about the people who were the targets of pogroms of genocide aimed at exterminating an entire race of people is, those teenagers might learn how to be more empathetic towards people not like them–or their parents. And echoing what many have said, eighth graders see worse on TV, video games, on social media, and on the internet.
