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

Day 10 “A Year of Thoughts”: What is your focus? Let Us Heal Together

“What you focus on here on earth will be your focus in heaven”

 

 

I went to dinner alone tonight because my girl friend was gone and most of my friends had already eaten, so I scanned the tables for someone to talk to. As I did I found an elderly man that that I knew use to live in town and had been a part of this community for a long time. Being a part of this college community in small town Kansas for three years now I had learned his name, but really didn’t know much about him at all. So I chose to go and sit at his table hoping that I might learn something from him.

 

I’ve found that almost all older men have a story to tell and often are waiting for someone to share it with.

 

In this case it held true.

 

Tonight I began to learn the story of Robin Johnston and the focus of his life.

 

There are just some people that you can look at them and you can see the kindness, passion, and love that they have tried to pour out for years. Robin’s smile and passionate kind eyes seem to say that as he reaches out his hand to introduce himself. There is nothing shy about him, he spoke to me as if he had known me for quite some time and as we talked we realized our lives had more connections than we thought.

 

Robin went to school here at Barclay College back in the days before it was changed to Barclay college. He told me about how after graduating he wanted to get more experience in ministry so he pastored out in Berkley, California. He said it wasn’t always easy because many of the people were quakers and christians by name only, however, he said that the four years that he had there were some of the best years of his life. From there he and his wife moved to Chicago, where he went on to get his master’s degree at Wheaten College. Another great learning experience that he said helped him to grow.

 

Eventually, Robin found himself back at Barclay this time as a professor. As we talked I learned that he had taught my mentor Paul Romoser, when Paul was a student here. It was cool to see Robin’s reaction to know that someone he had taught had in turn taught me. Some of the leadership and youth ministry ideas that he had passed on were still being passed on. I learned that much of Robin’s focus in life had been teaching others how to live life and do ministry.

 

He spent years investing in people in the United States and around the world. When I find people that have spent their whole lives striving to do what they believe God called them to do I’m honored to even know them, nonetheless, to carry on a conversation with them. Even in his old age Robin expressed his worries and his heart for the this generation and the next.

 

Over the course of our conversation, I tried to explain my vision of “love helps” and how I wanted to make the focus of my life about training leaders and helping people life life to the fullest. I believe often times in ministry or just any occupation, or way of life we can make our focus about doing things rather than trying to focus on what really matters. I don’t want my life to be about doing things but rather loving people. As we learn to love people then we will learn to do things. We can change the world.

 

In chapel today Derek Brown, was talking about how the world is full of tribes. Tribes that stand for different things, they have different purposes, different banners they carry, and different ways to live. Likewise the church is one of those tribes, but sadly the church has become an ineffective tribe.

 

See the early church was a tribe that understood that Jesus teachings and may of life were meant to be applied. They did apply them and the world was forever changed but why are we ineffective today?

 

 

Well because we have lost our identity and our community.

 

 

The early church did everything together. They ate together, they lived together, they shared life together. Derek made the point, “that the disconnected church today would call that a cult.” As followers of Christ our identity is in the suffering and love of what Christ did on the cross for us. That is what has really changed our lives and freed us to live, yet we have forgotten. We have forgotten our focus. We have forgotten how to live in community?

 

One of the thoughts that I have been going over for a while in my head is that Jesus and the early church never separated themselves from the broken hurting people of the world.

 

They were living with, eating with, sharing life with the broken and finding HEALING TOGETHER.

We have a lot of broken hurting people in this and the next generation. Yet they are longing for identity, a place to fit in a community and they long for healing. But the communities that should be called forth to love them and walk with them through the healing of those hurts and wounds are often to busy doing things to love them.

 

In Matthew 16:19 Jesus says, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and what ever you loosen on earth will be loosen in heaven.”

 

Binding and loosing is a matter of what we are focusing on. Where is our focus, because those things that are our focus, well they matter in the end. Is our focusing on loving people, sharing life, and living the way that Jesus did?

 

Are we finding the broken and hurting and finding healing in Jesus together.

 

Jesus was never disconnected from his world.

 

He knew the hurts, he knew people’s stories not just because he was God but because he spent quality time with them. He slowed down enough to listen and to care.

 

The church, we the church, we the people that claim to follow Christ and represent him as a tribe that stands under the banner of love has often been guilty of divorcing ourselves from the world that needs us the most. We stopped being an honest, real, open and raw community that wants to heal with the world.

 

We spend a lot of time and energy telling, teaching and educating the world about what we believe but do we show them with our lives. Do we invite the world to see our wounds and hurts and show them our healer? For many years the church has been so scared of Hell and made staying out of it there focus rather then facing their fears, asking questions, and exploring the world that God has placed them to love in, share in, and live in.

 

Where is our focus?

 

Is our focus on freeing and loosing the world around us so that we might allow them to see our savior in heaven or is our focus on condemning the world, divorcing ourselves from them and caring little about people that God created.

 

After talking to Robin Johnston today at dinner I believe his focus is still about learning to know God more, to love people, and to invest in their lives. It may mean just coming to the college to have a meal once or twice a month and talking to students. He doesn’t do a lot of the stuff that he use to. He doesn’t get up in front of a class and teach like he did when he was a college professor, but if he were to read this I would want him to know that he is effective in what he is doing now. Why? Because his focus.

 

In the span of a thirty minute dinner he ate with me, shared life with me and told me his story.

 

That is church.

 

Encouraged by his words to chase my dreams of learning to love and help the hurting heal I feel my focus is in the right place.

 

What is your focus?

 

-Caleb Ross Hunter

Day 1 “A Year Of Thought” : Wind Swept By Love

 

Wind Swept

I am a no body

From an unknown state

Anything but myself

 

This wind swept love

Keeps telling me

I can’t stay the same

You’re somebody who’s got to love

 

This wind swept love

Found me with you

From the broken to healing

All that we need to be in love

 

It’s all our own,

It’s all our own,

Give it like the wind

Feel it as we go

 

-Caleb Ross Hunter

 

 

A thought that has been flouting through my mind the past few months comes in the form of a simple sentence “Love like the wind”, but what does that mean.

 

I feel it’s effect,

I can see it’s effect,

I can sense the change that comes with it’s effect,

But I can never fully capture it, it’s powerful and real.

 

Love like the wind, can’t really be stopped when it’s starts blowing, it can be calmed but the potential is always there. If we are loving like the wind we have to be someone, we have to be ourselves, but we always have the option to be moving, growing, and letting love have an effect on us. Right now I am wind swept. I’m wind swept by God’s crazy love that overwhelms me everyday. I can feel it changing me, I can see it moving me, but I can’t fully capture it but it’s there it’s real.

I am also wind swept by the awesome love from the people around me. Like a cool breeze or warm summer wind love is blowing and bringing joy out of the depth of my heart. I want to find ways to love like the wind everyday. Ways for people to feel it, to see it and be changed by it. I want to live it.

 

LOVE LIKE THE WIND

 

LET LOVE SWEEP YOU AWAY

 

-Caleb Ross Hunter