Heroic Love

It’s easy to love if you travel to a lonely, impoverished village where ragged hungry children roam here and there.

It’s easy to love when you walk into an orphanage where abandoned, lonely children sit staring with empty eyes. 

Love would come easy. Not only because their circumstances produce deep compassion from your heart, (as it should) but also because I think it feels heroic to love them.  What do I mean by heroic? 

The definition of that word is: “The actions, qualities, or efforts that display exceptional courage, nobility, or self-sacrifice, often in the face of great danger or extreme difficulty.”

To give of your self, your time, your money, your leisure, your resources and your love to the children in those difficult circumstances seems heroic to our minds. It gets recognition, it gets support, it gets sympathy, it gets respect and it makes you feel as if you have done something glorious. 

Now let’s visit another place where children live, inside the four walls of your own home.

In this place, you are also required to give of yourself, your time, your money, your leisure, your resources, and your love. But suddenly, loving doesn’t feel so heroic and glorious anymore. In our culture, and often in our churches, it does not get recognition, support, sympathy, and respect. To love little children at home in this way, day in and day out, is seen as a drudgery and a waste of one’s life. It’s hard work and mostly unseen. 

But are not children still children, wherever they are and whatever their circumstances?

Every child needs someone to love them and love them heroically. There are very few of us who God will call to love in a lonely village or a dirty orphanage. The majority of us will be called to love the ones He sends to our own homes

In every place we are called to love, and we can love heroically with Christ’s help. 

“But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

II Peter 1:5-8