Extravagant love

I have just come out of one of those incredible experiences that leaves one overwhelmed with the joy of it and devastated by the loss of it. It's not as if I haven't been here before. I know what it is like to have an intimate community; and I even have worked hard at creating that community.

That role is familiar to me. I've worked with youth for a dozen years, led life groups/ministry groups of women,  young adults, grade school, junior high and senior high students, done one on one mentoring of young women, students and leaders, led theatre ministry teams, kitchen teams, missions teams and now as a supervisor for 14 support staff at my school, I'm working hard to create community and intimacy among us there.

How do you create community you ask? It is a drawing of people together, in purpose (whether in a task or in mutual encouragement) and also to bring them to an understanding that they are 'known' as an individual; that their concerns are significant to another person, that they themselves are significant just as they are. An atmosphere of trust and safety is encouraged, by personal sharing of the leader, by the risk of transparency to 'put it out there' and in doing so encourages others to take the risk of vulnerability as well. And in the end what every human heart wants is to belong, to be accepted...we often will go to great lengths to modify our appearance or behaviour to do this...but the true acceptance comes only when we are authentic before another and still drawn in.

What I know for sure is that the creation of this kind of authentic community comes out of an extravagant love, larger, more encompassing than is possible from the human heart. It is a love that asks no return, no reward, no recompense for the cost of it; it is a complete pouring out of ardor that comes from an external supernatural source.

1 Thessalonians 3:12-13 (MSG) And may the Master pour on the love so it fills your lives and splashes over on everyone around you, just as it does from us to you. May you be infused with strength and purity, filled with confidence in the presence of God our Father when our Master Jesus arrives with all his followers.

I was asked this week to write a short blurb for the back of our church bulletin about what it is liked to be used by God. This is what I wrote...

"I am wholly inadequate to the ministry that God has given me. I find it absurd that He uses an ordinary if ridiculous woman like me to play out or direct drama on stage, to hang out with and teach dear young people thirty or more years my junior, to mentor others in leadership or to pen a novel. While He has gifted me with communication and theatrical skills, it is only when I offer them in willingness and with abandon to His good and His glory that the supernatural happens. Community is formed. People are moved. Hearts are changed. Extravagant love overflows. I know I am not capable of these things in my own strength. I am not special. I am ordinary. My God however is very special. He is extraordinary. And I am willing. I am completely overwhelmed by how He uses me...grateful and humbled by it. There are so few things that are a certainty in this world but there are moments in surrendering your actions and words and thoughts to God in a love offering when you know for sure you are doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time for exactly the right reason. The moment may not last long but while it does it is a sweet, sweet place to be."

I am a blessed, blessed woman to have had a number of sweet moments of extravagant love....ah, so, so sweet, my heart just aches with the memory of it. When you've experienced it, you just want it more and so become more willing to extract the cost of it...time, energy, attention...while the reward is not the point of it, the joy of that sweetness is worth it. Every. Single. Time. 

I urge you to open yourself to the gift of extravagant love...to embrace it and let it overflow onto others. From wherever you are, whatever your gifts or skills or experience...just be willing to risk the vulnerability, the transparency, the authenticity...abandon yourself to it. While we search in this life constantly for that kind of significance, security and acceptance, if we find the True Treasure, we find we have all that and more already...with the sweet intimacy of Christ. And so risking it before others, is really no risk at all. 

1 John 3:1 (The Voice) Consider the kind of extravagant love the Father has lavished on us—He calls us children of God! It’s true; we are His beloved children.