Love in Action

Of all the people I have known, my Grandma Mary Pugh was the one who seemed the closest to God. By that, I simply mean the one most convinced that God exists right here, right now and was her friend on a daily basis. She particularly liked the Christmas season and shared in the joy of it not only with her family, but with the scores of her piano students over the years.

After we each played our selection of Christmas songs for her, we were rewarded with her serving us a sumptuous array of cookies and wassail. Scottish shortbread, little petit-fours, and other sweets were ours for the taking. The cinnamon and clove aroma of orange spiced tea filled her home. Her annual Christmas tea parties were a welcome treat for us on a snowy December’s day in north central West Virginia.

She had a great deal of joy and a graceful confidence, which she gladly spent on others at her home, at our church, and at other family or community gatherings. Where Grandma was, fun was! In the summertime, people loved to drive by her house just to see the enormous array of colorful flowers she tended in her front yard. She was one live wire.

Pear-shaped, she would occasionally “tip over” while tending her flower beds. She would laughingly explain to a young grandson what she did next. “First, I make sure I’m all right. And then—I look around to see if anyone saw me tip over!”

When she passed away at age 88, after a stroke caused her to live with us the last eight years of her life, many of us reflected on her life’s lessons for us. At her funeral, some of her admirers were able to give brief eulogies. I gave one for the grandchildren, using the famed “love chapter” from 1 Corinthians 13. I noted that John Wesley’s hope was that, by the end of one’s life, a Christian should be getting close to sanctification, of being nearly “perfected in love” by the Holy Spirit. So I read 1 Corinthians 13 but substituted my Grandma’s name for the word “love” to see if it fit.

“Mary is patient . . . Mary is kind . . . Mary does not insist upon her own way. . . .”

I read the whole section, and everyone present seemed to get my point. We don’t know how close Mary Pugh really was to sanctification, but she certainly was ahead of us on that glorious road. We all smiled with remembering her at the end of each verse, particularly the end: “Mary never ends.”

Loving someone else is easy when it involves a person like my Grandma, who had worked out her salvation with her Lord, and had surmounted with Him many trials over a long life. She had known the Lord’s friendship through everything from the death of parents and later her husband to her eight year fight with a stroke that cut her down from a very active life. What was not to love in such a woman?

But loving others is not always that easy. The rest of us, Christians included, who are not as saintly as we would like, present challenges to those who would love us. Only by really knowing each other better can we hope to understand where the other person is coming from and how to love them properly. Only then can one know just how to demonstrate love, which in the end is merely wanting the very best for the other person, namely God’s will for them.

Depending on the situation, one person may require tough love to help him see reason. Another may need more than the usual amount of patience, lest they become the one sheep that leaves the ninety nine. Still another may not respond to calm, reasoned discussion but may first need a hug to know that they are really loved. Love’s intention and ultimate goal remain the same, but the manifestations and creative expressions of Christian love are as different as the people we encounter along life’s way.

In his book, Loving God, Chuck Colson includes this description of Christian love. This quote is from the Christian writer Aristides describing these new people called Christians to the Emperor Hadrian:

They love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If they have something they give freely to the man who nothing; if they see a stranger, they take him home, and are happy, as though he were a real brother. They don’t consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit of God.

In short, Christians gave to each person what was needed as best they could discern with God’s help. To the orphans and widows, they offered protection. To strangers, hospitality. And to one another, love, in whichever manifestation of agape best suits at the time.

Love is extraordinarily multifaceted. It is not always praise, not always fun. But it always cares and ultimately conveys that Christian compassion, even while remembering that each person is a child of God with their own decisions to make. Importantly, Christian love cares quite specifically, as Jesus always did, and works best only after prayer and really attempting to understand the other person and their needs, hopes, dreams, and challenges.

After all, Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor, not merely “the world.”

Stephen Reed, a Centurion in the 2008 class, is a former talk radio host and serves as grants and foundations specialist for PFM.