Love makes room for the undeserving. Love looks for the lost son, the lost sheep, the heavy laden, the poor in Spirit, the poor in just plain poverty, and swoops them into the arms of God without a second thought.
It’s not that love is against the deserving. It’s just that the deserving often times don’t “get” love. Pride, yes. Success, yes. Self-sufficiency, yes. But sometimes – Jesus goes so far as to suggest oftentimes – the deserving don’t understand or even want love, as love is shaped in the kingdom.
Love, as the Apostle Paul suggests, “bears all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). Maybe it isn’t fair that we shoulder so much as faithful people: other people’s odd ways of doing things, their disregard of us and our gifts, their downright rudeness and painful judgement. Maybe it isn’t fair at all. But love isn’t interested in the fairness business. Love bears.
This message is excerpted from “Anything but fair” by Karen Bates Olson in the October 2016 Gather magazine.
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