Love Helps… Just a thought.

“Love helps is when we instill hope in others by pursuing their significance, not our own”

A thought. A singular thought. Not more than two words: Love Helps. This thought started in 2011 when I had the opportunity to spend six months in Brazil, South America. I went down to Brazil to teach English at an international school in Carpina. I had traveled to Carpina before on short-term mission trips with my church’s youth group, and I had also known the missionaries since the early 1990’s. But I soon realized that I was unprepared for what God had to teach me while I was there. I was so completely unprepared to be a teacher, but now I have come to realize that not only had God brought me to Brazil to teach, but for him to also teach me.

The first couple of months were anything but easy. I had difficulty in adjusting to the culture, I struggled with living with the missionary family, and felt more homesick than I ever have in my entire life. There, I found myself vulnerable, broken, and hurt. I had nowhere to run, and there was no escape. I couldn’t just leave and not teach. I had to face the pain.

There was one day that I remember particularly well.. It was after I had taught my morning classes and I came back to an empty room where I usually took breaks between my classes. That morning I had felt so defeated and I thought my students were not learning anything. I was really questioning why I had come 2,000 miles away from home and put myself through this. Even as I think about it now I still feel the pain of that day.. I literally cried for an hour or more, asking God “why”.

My plane ticket said I wasn’t leaving until July and this was March, so I had no choice but to stay. In that moment, in the midst of my defeat, is when God showed up. Through my tears, I realized where I was hurt, broken, and vulnerable in that place. God started asking me to be honest. He asked me to try to answer why I had come. As I thought about it, I did not want to answer, because I knew my reason was wrong and foolish. When it came down to it, I had come to Brazil for me. I came because being a missionary teacher seemed like an awesome experience. I thought most people would not have dared to to get up and move to Brazil, so it would make me better than them.

Honestly, I had been pursuing my own significance. Selfishly, I wanted my students to all learn English really well because it would mean I did something good. That is when God broke my heart. I felt God tell me to stop trying to teach these student and start loving them. Like most of the time whenever God asks us to do something, we start making excuses.

I told God I’m not any good at loving people… His response was, “it’s not up to you”.

Out of those next few months, God started to lay upon my heart a dream of Love Helps. Simply put: I want to help others live love. But what has been incredibly challenging about this is the fact that to help others, I have to first accept and trust that God loves me. It sounds easy, but it’s not, because it forces me to be honest about the state of my heart, my love, and my life. On May 13^th, 2011 I wrote,

“When I looked at myself I didn’t like who I saw, anger and hate had enslaved me to my lies, farther from the light, from the light… but LOVE HELPS, it set me free, made me who I am, Unashamedly Me”

When I was able to accept the fact that God loved me even though I was selfish and unconcerned about the world around me, I started to realize that life wasn’t about me. The last three months in Brazil were full of great experiences. I began to learn how to love my students and appreciate them for who God created them to be. I started to forgive myself and allow God to free me up be the man he created me to be. This is a process and journey that I am still on.

Fast-forward to the now.. Recently, my wife and I were having a conversation about love and how this society and culture both try to get us to buy into the lie that life is all about us. That it’s about our significance. It’s a lie that started in the garden of Eden when the serpent told Eve that if she ate from the tree, she would be like God. What Eve forgot was that she was already significant. Her significance came from God.

See, God already loves us. Our true significance, if we are honest, can only be found in him, but so often we chase after everything else to fill that void. We try to pursue our own significance. We buy all the replacement Jesus’ that the world offers, but refuse to open our hearts to let God in. Out of that conversation with my wife came the line, “Love helps is when we instill hope in others by pursuing their significants…Not our own.”

But what does that really mean? How do we live that out? At the end of the “love chapter” in 1^st Corinthians (ch. 13), Paul writes, “These three remain faith, hope, and love but the greatest of these is love”. I have always thought this whole chapter was rather poetic, especially this last line, but as I have studied it I have come to notice a connection between all of these things.

First, we have faith. Faith in it’s most basic terms is full or total trust. In this case, it is full and total trust in God. When we have full and total trust in God, we are honest with him. We understand he loves us, died for us, and forgave us of our sins. It is tragic to think that many times we have faith that heaven exists but we lack the ability to fully trust that God loves us and wants to be in relationship with us. Faith is not about heaven, faith is about God. Ask yourself these questions:

Am I pursuing God, or am I just pursing Heaven?

Do I honestly love God with everything? And I mean everything…

The second thing we have is hope. Well, what is hope? When you look up the word hope in the Dictionary, you will find the words “to believe or trust that something is going to happen”. I think a good way to put hope is to “be encouraged or to encourage”. When we trust God and believe in him we give hope to the rest of the world. God’s love for us gives us hope. It encourages us to live life. Faith and hope are tied tightly together. We, as people of the earth, need to be encouraged but we also need to learn to encourage. This is what it means to instill hope, to encourage. Ask yourself?

Am I so busy pursuing others significance, or my own?

Am I being a voice of hope to those around me?

The most important of these is love. Why? Because faith plus hope, in action, equals love. Not that it’s a simple math equation that should be so easy to figure out, but when we understand that God is the variable that makes all this work, it starts to make sense. When we put our total trust in God and fully accept his love and forgiveness ,we receive hope from that; a hope that is well worth sharing with the rest of the world. When we put that faith and hope into action there we find our ability to love. We find that we can pursue others significance over our own.

I had to ask myself “why do I lack the ability to truly love others”? I found the answer was because I was pursuing my own significance outside of God’s love for me. God is still working on my heart and shaping my life. Now I can say that I have a deep love for humanity. A fire within my bones to see the world alive, awake, and moving toward loving God with everything we are by using our abilities, strengths, gifts, talents, and passions to help our neighbors in any way that we can, with open hands of love.

-Caleb Ross Hunter

Once Upon A Time + As We Go

Once upon a time, just a month ago I stood on the other side of a doorway waiting to seeing my bride for the first time. In that moment I stood there thinking everything is about to change. The world I once knew will no longer be the same and the future is just on the other side of the door. The future, the unknown, the adventure is about to begin.

“Once upon a time”… those words at the beginning of every good story that tell you something is about to begin. That moment in which you are about to be swept away to a different place and time, and everything you once knew is going to change. There are a few moments in my life that could be prefaced with the words “Once upon a time”. Like Once upon a time I packed up my car said goodbye to my parents and sisters to set out on a long drive to a small college I had never visited in Kansas. Or once upon a time I lived as a missionary and english teacher in Brazil, South America for six months. Or once a upon a time I packed up everything I owned to move by myself to North Carolina to be a youth pastor.

When I left for Kansas I knew I was setting out on an three year adventure for which I had hoped would bring me the opportunity to learn and get a college degree. The goal was set and navigating the trails was to be much easier than the Lewis and Clark expedition. Then when I set out to go to Brazil my visa only allowed for one hundred and eighty days in the country and so it was obvious when I would return home. In Brazil the future was not as clear cut as college, however, once I figured out how to teach and adapt on a missions field the adventure mostly enjoyable. After living in Indiana, Kansas, and Brazil, North Carolina just seemed liked another place to explore.

However, all of these other “Once upon a time” moments in my life pails in comparison to that moment where I stood waiting for my bride to walk down the aisle. As those doors were opened and I saw her standing there in her white dress any fears I had of the adventure a head of us was swept away with joy. For the first time in my life I realized I was not walking into the unknown future alone. In Genesis God said “It’s not good for man to be alone”, and everyday that becomes more clear to me.

If there is anything that I have learned over this first month of marriage it is that life is meant to be shared. Not just the living space, or the bed or the food we prepare for dinner, but the experience of life itself. The experience of our everyday living should be shared. When we decided to get married we were making the decision to be a community, a family, best friends, and partners in exploration. A team that is committed to love and share as we go through life.

Yesterday at a bible study at the church were I serve we had a discussion about missions and what does that look like to live out the call that God has given us. As you might expect we turned to the typical verse about missions Matthew 28:19-20 (NIV), “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the very end of the age.” Over the years I have been a little skeptical of the people that point to this verse and say lets help missionaries, but do little of anything but send money to foreign fields. We often forget that this was intended for us. For us to make disciples. Our senior pastor made the point that in the greek the “Therefore go” is better understood as “AS YOU GO”. As you go through life make disciples, baptize people, teach and do everything that I have done.

I think we have it all wrong if we think that the only way that we can make disciples is if we have classes or invite people to church. When I look at what Jesus did with his disciples I see a man who was willing to share life with people. To love them despite their faults, to teach when necessary, to forgive always, to tell stories, to travel with, to eat with and to simply live life together. Jesus lived out an example of what it meant to make disciples and so those disciples knew that meant that the future was not going to be clear cut and obvious. They learned that following Jesus was more of an adventure than a college course on truth.

Likewise in the past month I have been reminded that despite how many marriage counseling books or classes I taken, I have to learn to love as we go. I am learning that Jesus can us as a married couple to make disciples out of each other. To walk as Jesus did sharing life as we go.

Once upon a time Jesus descended into heaven leaving his disciples standing there in the field looking for him. They stood there much like I stood there waiting for my bride. Neither of us knew completely what the future would hold but the Holy Spirit has and will give us the strength to go forth into what God has prepared for us.

We the church are the bride of Christ he is waiting for us to walk through the door. To walk with people and to begin to be and do what he has called us to do. I can not say that I will ever fully have marriage figured out and I can honestly say that I may never fully have christianity figured out. However, I am committed fully to both, to living out to the fullest in sharing life with my wife and to following Jesus in this adventure of life. As we go, as we learn, as we share may we fix our eyes on Jesus knowing each moment is a once upon a time story that is just about to begin.

 

-Caleb Ross Hunter