Grace-driven acceptance of a person does not mean open-ended availability …

I read a lot when I am in a season of insomnia (like right now). I try to pray, too. And sometimes I even exercise! But mostly, I read. Old stuff, new stuff; happy stuff, blue stuff. OK. Not really blue stuff—but exhaustion also makes me punchy, so sometimes the silliness comes out in Seussian rhymes. And gaffes.

(Like last night when I was looking up a friend’s address to send his wife and him a card and I accidentally Facetimed him at 3AM! Poor guy. But also a nice guy—he just laughed it off and told me he prayed for our family as he rolled over and went back to sleep.)

No Facetiming sleeping people halfway around the world tonight! No. Instead, I’ve been entertaining myself by paging through random posts on various family birthdays and Sophie’s sixth birthday gave me this little treat:

Created for Community (by Paul Tripp)

What a great read. I tend to like Dr. Tripp’s earlier writings more than his current stuff, but this article is the exception that helps to prove the rule. It builds well and his conclusions are spot-on, at least from my severely sleep-deprived perspective. Here are just a few of my notes from the article. Don’t they encourage and challenge you too?

“True community requires intentionality. There are decisions that you will have to make, there are habits you will have to break, and there are choices you will have to make to live in productive Christian community.

True community requires sacrifice. I will never enjoy the productive community that the body of Christ was designed to be without making specific and concrete sacrifices of time, energy, schedule, leisure, privacy, etc.

True community requires patience. I never get to be in community with perfect people. So community is messy and unpredictable. Yet, God uses this messiness to promote His grace in our lives.

What does all of this mean? It means that community requires Christ. We are people who have been dramatically and graciously loved by God, and so we are committed to loving others as God has loved us …

Rather than being a critiquing presence, we look for every opportunity to be a loving presence … For the love that we give others is not ours; it is His love, living is us and being incarnated for others to see, and that love is the most powerful, transformational force in the universe.”

Yes it is!

And tonight I am praying for each one of us, that even our most broken and seemingly hopeless/dead relationships will be made alive again—strengthened again—by “the most powerful, transformational force in the universe”: the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

I hope you are sleeping right now! And I hope I can sleep again soon, too.

Your grateful friend,
Tara B.

PS
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then I know that you are well acquainted with what is probably my all-time favorite CCEF article (“Helping Difficult People in Your Church” by Dr. Tim Lane). But just in case you are new here, or to give us all a super quick reminder of some important things to remember AS we are striving to LOVE, here are a few notes I’ve taken directly from Dr. Tim Lane’s fabulous article. These are the things I try so hard to remember re: Christian love and Christian community, especially community with difficult people (like me!):

• 1 Peter 4:8 calls us to “love one another deeply” and “keep love constant.” That kind of love is a stretching and extended love, both in depth and endurance. We can only love like this if we are remembering the “width and height and depth” of the love of Christ as described in Ephesians 3.
• Even the best of relationships take time and effort. But the unpleasant relationships with, say, hypothetically, people who come from abusive childhood origins, struggle with debilitating addictions, who are even themselves surprised and overwhelmed by their own responses to new trauma in their lives? It can be easy for all of us to instinctively try to avoid, back away from, label, overpower/control, or appease such people. Love calls us to fight against these instincts. We may need to modify how we stay in certain relationships and what love looks like. But love does not give up on people when the going gets tough. Love digs in, gets help, and stays.
• (I’ll close with my favorite Dr. Tim Lane quote of all time …) “Grace-driven acceptance of a person does not mean open-ended availability.” (Preach it, Dr. Lane! Love can, and often should, say, “No.”)