~ CHAPTER NINE ~
Love’s Got Everything to Do with It
“And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”-1 Corinthians 13:13
This popular verse taken out of context from the Love Chapter pops up everywhere from wedding invitations to Facebook affirmations adorned with mythical unicorns. The Beatles reduced it to a human level in their song, “All You Need Is Love,” while Tina Turner lost all hope in ever finding it.
The Apostle Paul is talking about a different love—it’s God’s agape love through us as we minister to others with our gift. What kind of vessel are you? Not only for the gifts bestowed on us by the Spirit, but the responsibility to exercise them through the blood of Jesus Christ. How then do we show this love through our gifts?
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“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.” 1 Corinthians 13:1
We move a lot. My husband builds homes—we live in the model till it sells, and off we go to the next one. This timing in selling the current house and building another—invariably we would stay with my parents or find other accommodations. It’s easier now with just Dick and me, but years ago as a young mother with three children—it could get hectic.
I’ll never forget one move. This particular “tour of duty” we settled into a furnished apartment in the neighborhood where the new home was under construction. We’d only lived there two days when I discovered roaches darting across the kitchen floor. I alerted the office manager, and they promised to send an exterminator out that afternoon. I cleared out the cabinets of dishes, pots and pans, etc., and placed them on the furniture in the living room.
Not wanting my children exposed to the bug spray; we left for the day. We returned later to our bug-free apartment tired from a day at the swimming pool and marketing. I’d stacked my groceries on the kitchen table and the floor and had just removed my eighteen-month-old’s wet red polka-dot bathing suit and hung it on the back of a chair when I heard a knock at the door.
Through the peep-hole I saw a man and two women. Assuming they were apartment managers I opened the door. “Yes?” I said, the latch still chained to the door.
“We’re from High and Mighty Church welcoming new people to the area,” the man said.
I invited them in! We had been members of the church years before, knew the Pastor and even though my apartment was a disaster and the children had now run amuck, I longed for some adult company. Anna in her birthday suit, romped along on the floor scooting on a watermelon. My four-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter decided it would be fun to hide in a cramped linen closet in the living room from the people knocking on the door, the youngest one teetering atop the older one.
I told my guests we had just moved in and sorry for the chaos and couldn’t even offer them iced tea or coffee. They found a place to sit down and stared at baby Anna as she sat naked on our melon staple for the Fourth of July.
They began their spiel with no preliminary chit-chat. To my great surprise they witnessed to me, warning me I was a sinner and that I needed Christ. Blind-sided, I muttered I was a Christian! But they didn’t believe me. They continued to look around the room—as if having a bad day coincided with salvation. Defensive, I started name dropping! I told them we were friends with their Pastor, and that we knew many of the people who attended their church. Then one of the women, a sober-looking woman with a wig, asked me: “If you died today, do you know with full assurance you would go to heaven?”
Just then I heard giggling and rumbling from the closet. My two older children fell through the bi-fold closet doors and crashed onto the floor rolling in laughter. I told them they had to go. Not my children, the man and his two side-kicks.
They handed me tracks that looked like comic books with frightening pictures of people on fire. They looked around one more time at my surroundings with depressed looks on their faces. Poor woman. Unruly children, roaches, and going to hell!
At first, I was just relieved to see them go. But then—like Paul, who exercised his rights as a Roman citizen—I called the church and asked to speak to the Pastor. He wasn’t in, but I told the church secretary the appalling visit I’d experienced from their Outreach Committee. “They had better go back to the drawing board and reinvent their approach,” I suggested, and “I’ve never been more humiliated or offended by a brother or sister in Christ.”
I would apply the old saying, “If I can’t be a good example, then let me at least be a horrible warning.” Paul warned about it didn’t he? And what a great analogy—clanging cymbals and resounding brass! In one translation it reads noisy gongs. Gifts don’t matter, nothing matters, if we do it in our own strength, or have our own agenda, or a vessel the Spirit can’t use for agape love.
What a missed opportunity—I sure could have used some love that day.