Someone loves you!

Here in our community we have the tradition of gathering weekly in one of our homes for a time of fellowship and prayer. We call it Prayer Night, and the assistants take turns cooking a meal for everyone, and we spend some time together in fellowship, talking and socializing. After the meal, we have a discussion or an activity led by an assistant based on a particular theme. For a few weeks we are focusing on the theme of "Looking forward with trust and call in the mission."

At one of our recent Prayer Nights, one of our assistants was leading a discussion about our future and we were thinking what that might look like for each one of us and for our community. We drew pictures of how we see ourselves today and what we hope to be in the future. As a way to wrap it up the assistant was sharing how each of our futures might be different, and might include different things, but there is one thing that is consistent in all of them and that is that there is someone who will always love us, no matter what. Then she asked the group who that someone might be.

One of the core members who was sitting close to me answered the question with a loud, "MARK LEPPER!"

Now, I know this isn't the answer the assistant was hoping people would say. She was expecting them to say God, or Jesus, and several of them did. And while I laughed at the humor that I saw in the particular core members answer, I was actually touched by his response.

In the Bible, there is a lot of talk about love. Jesus tells his disciples numerous times that they are to love one another, love their neighbors, love their enemies... pretty much love everybody. The second most important commandment, next to loving God, is that we are to love others.

I know that I fall short of this command pretty often. I can sometimes be impatient, unfriendly, short-tempered, and even rude. But at our Prayer Night, this core member's answer helped me to see that I must be doing something right.

"We are not called by God to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love." - Jean Vanier