The following is a small but necessary side trip from our main theme – God’s kind of Love, and relationships that come from God, but I am hopeful that it will prove helpful for those who have a heart to love like God in relationship to others.
Over the past 40 years of attempting to live this out, I have come to think of myself as a lover in training. I commend this identification to you as well.
That said, there is no challenge as lovers in training so difficult and demanding as loving and being caught between two people who don’t get along or are incompatible. If you love and encourage the one, you offend and discourage the other. It is the most conflicted situation that we, as lovers in training are likely to encounter.
Here again, this is where lovers in training need to turn to the cross, and even Jesus’ garden experience the night before the cross. Jesus was caught between us and His Father, with whom we were/are incompatible. For Him to drink the cup was to associate Himself with our incompatibility. “My God, My God why hast Thou forsaken me… ?” Psalms 22:1. This is the price of being caught between two people who don’t see eye to eye. It is the highest challenge to our faith, and the one where, more than any other, we need to identify ourselves as lovers in training.
Love!
Loving Like God 
Lovers in training – what a nice thought. I’ll take that.
To discourage one while encouraging the other…. I’ll have to think on this, seems like a side has been chosen, seems like we’re getting into right and wrong. I think loving supersedes right and wrong and just is. Sometimes to do the loving thing, the good thing, the kind thing is to let a grievance or a situation go, even when you’re right, because it’s the loving thing.
Ah, but now we’re talking about forgiving and forgiving when we haven’t been asked, hmmmm, can we go so far as to say loving is forgiving before we’re asked? What if we’re never asked? In the garden, Jesus stayed the course. The situation he faced… it was wrong. He didn’t deserve it. His humanity struggled against it. He carried the cross anyway, for love.
This is not so much about the desire or intention of discouraging anyone, it is about someone getting or feeling discouraged, be cause we were there for or encouraging or loving toward someone they don’t want to see encouraged or loved. It’s rather like what Jesus said: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn “‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law— a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” Matthew 10:34-36 NIV
I don’t think this was about the intention of those who would love The Lord, but rather the reaction to our love for Him, and others in Him.
Love!
JAY WROTE:
…..That said, there is no challenge as lovers in training so difficult and demanding as loving and being caught between two people who don’t get along or are incompatible. If you love and encourage the one, you offend and discourage the other. It is the most conflicted situation…..
Dear Lovers in Trainers….
Perhaps the Most important thing in this situation is for the Mature one in a Relationship to keep His or Her eyes focused on Jesus Love that is flowing into Usin the first instance then Out of Us as our identification becomes more with His in and by and through the Cross…..
Just a thought…
Some of the revelation I’ve had around this has to do with understanding and believing that God is capable of loving us all, all the time, with great passion. We are each and every one “his favorite”. When I stay focused on that, there’s no need for me to feel jealous of His loving another… I have and will always have all of His Love that I need or could ever hope for.
When we’re engaged in His Passion, we also have to recognize that His passion works vertically – between me and Him – as well as horizontally – Him in us and us in His passion together as His Church. If it’s working right, there is a lot of His passion working in us in our relationships from Him for each other. This, I believe, is the way He is building His Church. We have to learn to live in that Passion, know that it’s Him, and do it in His way, which is a whole new learning curve.
With all this passion going on, it’s tricky knowing how to be with those who aren’t experiencing the Passion – or who aren’t remembering His Passion, while at the same time not “turning from our first Love”. If we take Jesus seriously, taking our first Love seriously – and how He’s working it out in His Body – is the most important thing we have to do here. I think we all agree that making God first – the most important thing in our life – is supposed to be our ongoing, 24/7 focus. If we make Him first, then we have to make what He makes most important as part of that importance… which is His building of His Church. Those who don’t have this focus, or who lose sight of it, can only default to their human nature, which will make war on it.
Thanks, Jay, for bringing this issue to the forefront.
Bless you!
Love,
Lisa