Displaced Love
By Pastor Audrey Carmona
Mirror mirror on the wall…you know the rest, right?! I think the mirror is an interesting place we find ourselves looking into.
Adjusting, resetting, and affirming the angles and the curves, to ensure that our own personal definition is precise and unflawed. Just as we approach the physical mirror to help us look presentable to our daily audience, we also have an internal reflector. Except this one, you don’t adjust or manipulate to beauty, it just collects and reflects. All of life’s experiences, every good, bad, and ugly moment collected and stored, ready to be distributed through life. This “collector” is a stingy distributor of love, kindness, and empathy. It’s guarded, harsh holding the lines, restraining how much we give — limited love, a displaced love.
I think at the core of displaced love is fear, fear of wasted love. How many of us are withholding our love because people are undeserving of the love we can give? If this is how we are living, then this is a challenge to learn, study, and dwell in the love that Jesus Christ has set as a precedence. In other words, love, as by the Savior not as by if people deserve it. The purest form of love has been so beautifully defined by Jesus as He turned over His life to his murderers and committed all the way to death.
Imagine if our love comes from this example and imagine if it was replicated! I don’t think our world would look like it does — divided, using our own form of thinking to assimilate knowledge and therefore hurt and hate one another. Jesus taught us to love one another without bias. We must view the world through Jesus’ sacrifice, but to love everyone doesn’t mean we don’t stand on principle. It simply means we love you, but we don’t love what you do…or we love you but we don’t agree. Why does disagreement have to lead to hate? How different are we to the world then?! The solution to division is love.
We can look to things around us and with a weighty conviction, preach on how divided our nation is, but what if what we see externally is just as divided as we are internally? Displaced love, limited love…fear of wasted love navigating the uncharted waters of the times, pulling further and further away from the unblemished bride. The next time we look into those mirrors we should ask this…“mirror mirror on the wall…” or better yet, “Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit show me how deep my love goes for others.”
As we reflect on this reimagined love and how we can grow toward embodying it more as the Church, here are some questions to help guide our processing, journaling, and prayer!
- How do you define love? What does it look like for you and how do you outwork it in your different relationships?
- Where are the areas of division in your world that could use your unbiased love?
- Are you withholding love from someone who needs it? Who, why, and what’s holding you back?
- What part of your internal reflector needs to be recalibrated to allow you to share a truer form of displaced love?
Let’s pray for our church and for ourselves, to be radically transformed by an expression of love that reflects the sacrifice of our Savior and welcomes one another into greater community.
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