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

Restore My Joy… Enable Me To Go

“Yet I will Rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of the deer, he enables me to go on the heights.”-  Habakkuk 3:18-19

In October of 2012 I moved from Indiana south east to North Carolina, I left my family and a great group of friends behind. I didn’t fully realize how much those friends really meant to me until I found myself battling loneliness in my little apartment. I missed the deep philosophical conversations about competition that my friend Bobby and I would have over a game of cards. I missed the late night runs to Stake N’ Shake and our off key renditions of the Avett Brother’s song “Shame, which I’m sure we sang a thousand times. I missed the random weekly get togethers at someone’s house. You can’t really recreate that atmosphere of joyful community we had. That longing to just be together with others went with me when I left.  Ever sense those first few weeks here I have been praying for a community of people that I could just worship with and be myself. People who were more interested in being the church rather then doing church.

Over the months I started to get more discouraged and more lonely. I was discouraged by the fact that even in the church that I work at as youth pastor, there wasn’t that community. The doing of Church was all there, but the level of community and openness that I have had before was not. I found that it is much harder to lead when you feel like your running on empty. I am such a people person it hurts when I have to be alone. I think this probably has to do with the fact that I was raised in a house with four sisters and parents who always welcomed in our friends. When you are around people so much like I was growing up sharing life is just part of living and so when I am in a place where I am less able to share life with others it feels like I start to die. It’s as if my souls is fragile and weak outside the context of community.

Slowly, I started to make a few friends through some retreats that I attended as a leader and started to see hope again of community. Hope is a powerful thing, when hope takes root the world starts to seem like such a brighter place than before. So as I got to know these people a little more I started to hang out with a guy also named Caleb, which I find ironic. That was the start of God answering my prayers. I had not given up, but my hope had been fading.

Two weeks ago Caleb ask me if I want to go to a house concert in Greensboro where a local band was playing. I didn’t know the band but that didn’t bother me because concerts are one of my favorite things. So we went to the concert in someones living room where we knew no one. There was maybe 30 people crammed in the front room of the house. The small intimate space made for an awesome setting and the music started playing and I felt my soul coming back to life. Every word of the each song sounded like sweet worship to my ears.

After the show we were leaving and ran into the lead singer in the street. We started talking and just out of the blue he invited me to a monday night worship gathering that he and some friends have every week. I was stunned and excited because in my heart I knew thats what I wanted, really what I needed. A rough week went by and I sorta forgot about it. But then monday hit and I remembered the invite and looked him up and asked him where the gathering would be. He told me but said he wouldn’t be there. I thought about not going because I made the excuse I wouldn’t know anyone but I felt God kept saying you need to go, just do it and trust me. So I went, I drove up the greensboro to a neighborhood I had never been to, to a house I had never seen to hang out with people I have never met and it was exactly what I needed.

When I showed up I knocked on the front door but no body answered, after making sure my directions were right, I knocked again and realized the door was unlocked and cracked a little. I would’t recommend this but I let myself in. I heard some people talking in the back so I yelled hello and walked in. There were two guys there who welcomed me as if I was suppose to be there and just like I was a friend.

Others started showing up about 20 of us were there and we all shared a meal and talked. It felt like home to me. I didn’t know anyone when the night started but I felt like I was suppose to be there. After we ate we all moved into the living room and two of the guys started leading worship. There wasn’t sheet music or hymnals, they just picked a key and started singing and everyone joined in. As we sang I was reminded of my time in High school where we use to have a time of worship every wednesday night, where we would just sing worship songs together, no set order of songs or set time. We would all pray for those who needed prayer and just share together.

As the the group sang “Restore the Joy of my salvation God, be my hope oh Lord”, I was filled with Joy again. Joy that i could just be with people that just wanted to be together and sing praises to the Lord. People who just wanted to share a meal and conversation for no other reason than to be in community. It says in Acts that the early church met together, broke bread, prayed, worshiped and just were the church. The church was the people the community. I realize my faith is much stronger in the context of community. When in a place where I can be myself and just sing with all my heart for the Lord. Where life is shared in open honest community.

As the night closed the group shared praises and prayer requests.  There was both joy and sorrow shared with no hesitation. I told the group that I had been praying for a place, a community where I could just worship with others my age and felt like God had lead me there that night. It’s one of those God things. You look at it after the fact and say wow, I didn’t see that coming but I sure am glad it happened. As I drove away I felt God restoring the joy of my salvation.

When I woke up the next morning, I turned on my Bible app on my phone and read Habakkuk 3:17-19 “Though the fig three does not bud and there are no grapes on the vine, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stall YET I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights”

The Lord has restored my Joy and he is my strength, out of the loneliness and times when nothing seemed to be going right God was still working. He is faithful to restore, even when it doesn’t seem like it in the midst of the drought. He will enable us to God where he leads. I hope to go back again to be with this group of people, to be in community and to go where God leads.

-Caleb Ross Hunter