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!

By Jay Ferris, originally posted on April 10, 2011