My friend Mark is a poster boy to the power of love. Abused, then abandoned by his drug-dependent parents, Mark was found years later, languishing on city streets and in alleyways – dysfunctional and angry. A kind-hearted gentleman named Paul discovered him. Paul – just the father-figure Mark needed – took him under his wing. The journey had its setbacks, but authentic father love comes as a tenacious force.
Fast forward. Fifteen years in Mark himself routinely comes alongside men that are barely surviving at the fringes – every bit as broken as he had once been. Mark, like the rest of us, is far from perfect. A yielded Christ-follower, he’s a work in progress. Bearing God’s love.
The beckoning of Jesus to live the great commandment (love God fully, love others as myself) is not only called for, it is doable in a fuller measure than one might imagine.
It can be argued (and often is) that loving fully – i.e. for the most part with all of one’s being – is the mark of a person becoming fully human. God wishes this for us and, since his hopes are for our betterment, he himself enters the fray, lends aid. What aid it is!
But if a person would align himself with this venture (becoming one wholly given to love) they must want it and want it strongly. The hard truth is, few of us start out with that kind of “want to”. The process of being formed to Christlikeness starts (thank God), not with ourselves, but with him, with God.
God is Love.
Who among us would not want to be a loving human being? What person would look at authentic love and react with a ho-hum, “I’m not interested, thank you.”?
So, even though we do not start out all fueled and fired with an appetite to love God in the great commandment way, Christ himself tenderly invites us. He knows that we must begin where we are, not where we aren’t.
I want to want.
Some of us reach a place of saying, “I want to want what I presently do not want, and I want to not want what I presently do want”*.
This kind of simple honesty brings us to the needed “readiness of soul”. Since we cannot experience life transformation by ‘willing’ ourselves into readiness for it.
We begin where we are, not where we aren’t.
©2025 Jerry Lout *Dallas Willard
This is one of your best blogs and there has been many very special ones.Please keep them coming.
THANK you, Walter.