Love The One You're With

I want to share with you some excerpts from an article by Mary Sellon and Dan Smith, of the Alban Institute. Click here to read the whole article (it's worth reading!). Consider the questions they raise and how we might love one another more authentically.

Looking forward to worshiping with you on Sunday, and I hope you can stay for the AfterWord, where Marcy Schaeffer will share one way we can love our Burmese neighbors.

Blessings,
Manda

Texts For This Week:  
Epistles  -  Hebrews 4:12-16
Gospels  -  Mark 10:17-31 
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Our charge is to love. An old song by Stephen Stills featured the recurring line, “Love the one you're with.” Though the songwriter intended a different meaning, the line provides a fitting admonition for members of faith communities. “Love your neighbor” directs us to love whomever we are with, whether we like them or not.

The question from the Gospel of Luke in the Christian scriptures, “Who is my neighbor?” expresses a natural desire. Let me find someone I can naturally love and I will claim that person as my neighbor. The truth is that God gives us each person we encounter as a neighbor. Our neighbor is the person begging money outside the grocery store, the telemarketer who calls at dinner, and the person at the committee meeting who drives us crazy...

Six Essential Questions and Choices
We find six choices crucial for every relational interaction. These choices provide the groundwork for the relationship to be a loving relationship. These six choices make it possible for us to relate in loving ways and move toward fulfilling and life-giving relationships:

1. What do I want my relationship with this person to be like?
2. What attitudes and values do I want to honor as I’m with this person?
3. What must I let go of in order to turn towards this person?
4. What is the goodness in this person that I will see and trust?
5. How will I acknowledge to the person the holy goodness that I see in her or him?
6. What will I dare to ask of this person?

Discipline yourself to answer these questions as you prepare to be with people. These choices can enhance already good relationships and improve difficult ones. Practice making these choices with a variety of people. Over time, this process will become habit, done with unconscious competency. These six practices will strengthen all of your relationships and increasingly connect you in deep ways with others.

Excerpted from Practicing Right Relationship: Skills for Deepening Purpose, Finding Fulfillment, and Increasing Effectiveness in Your Congregation, copyright © 2005 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.