Preparing

What does it mean to love?

  Hey, it's May and in a couple of  months I am embarking on a new adventure to Nueva Esperanza, Honduras. I am going with the Mennonite Central Committee through the program called SALT (serving and learning together). I will work for the majority of the 11 months of this next year with kids who have HIV/AIDS in a youth home called Montana de Luz, which means mountain of light in Spanish. I will hopefully be fluent in Spanish and use that with my newly earned social work degree from the University of Kansas this May. In this youth home, I will most likely be teaching preschoolers in the mornings and I will work with jr high and high school youth in English and other school skills during the afternoons. 

 I am getting genuinely excited about the adventure of discovering Honduras. I think it will be an amazing, humbling and truly changing experience.  I hope to understand in greater depth what it means to love the people I will work and live with. I hope to understand how God, who is LOVE, will be real in the lives of those suffering from HIV/AIDS. I hope also to love the Honduran culture and become a more whole person through understanding this new perspective.

 In preparation for Nueva Esperanza, I was recently reading Thomas Merton. Here's a little ditty from his chapter "Love is being kept only by giving it away,"

 "One who really loves another is not merely moved by the desire to see him contented and health and prosperous in this world. Love cannot be satisfied with anything so incomplete. If I am to love my brother, I must somehow enter deep into the mystery of God's love for him. I must be moved not only by human sympathy but by that divine sympathy which is revealed to us in Jesus and which enriches our lives by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. The truth I love in loving my brother cannot be something merely philosophical and abstract. It must be at the same time supernatural and concrete, practical and alive. And I mean these words in no metaphorical sense. The truth I love in in my brother, is God Himself, living in him. I must seek the life of the Spirit of God breathing in him. And I can only discern and follow the mysterious life by the action of the same Holy Spirit living and acting in the depths of my own heart."

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

What are other characteristics of Love?

**Love never gives up.
** Love cares more for others than for self.
**Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
**Love doesn't strut,
**Doesn't have a swelled head,
**Doesn't force itself on others,
**Isn't always "me first,"
**Doesn't fly off the handle,
**Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
**Doesn't revel when others grovel,
**Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything,

* Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, 

But keeps going to the end.

The Message, 1 Corinthians 13:2-4