The True Test of Love: Loving Through Devastation
By Rev. Dr. Melinda Contreras-Byrd, Contributing Writer
The theme of God, juxtaposed with love, runs throughout the Bible. We are told that God is love; and that if you can’t demonstrate love, then you don’t truly know God. We are told that a summary of all that God has been trying to teach us is that we should love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind as well as love others as much as we love ourselves.
African Methodists affirm this truth in our liturgy every Sunday. It is also said weekly in the most central prayer in Jewish Temple worship. It is called the Shemah. Shemah means to hear, as in “Hear O Israel the Lord our God is one, and you should love the Lord our God.” Our Christian faith is all about being able to cut through everything and live lives that demonstrate, foremost, we are loving people.
I have often led workshops where Christians easily testified that they “love everybody.” My responsive quip was always that perhaps they hadn’t met some of the people that I have!
I have been through many situations in my own life and my profession has put me in a position to walk with many others through their life situations as well. A pearl of wisdom I have learned through both their and my own lived experience is that like forgiveness, it is a very difficult task to live a life of love.
The Bible says that a friend loves at all times. It also says that we are called to reach a level of maturity that enables us to love commensurate with how Jesus loved (John 13:34). Imagine my surprise when one day, after memorizing and repeating the words in I Corinthians 13 about love, I came to recognize a startling truth about the magnitude of what it takes to truly be a loving person. For the first time, I realized the implications of those verses. The truth is that one could give all that they have, offer up their body to be burned, manifest all kinds of high level of spiritual gifts, and still not be the kind of person that God calls loving!
So many times, the ability to love is connected to the ability to forgive. Many of us cannot be loving people because we still bear the wounds of those who have used or abused us. Many of us cannot be loving people because of the scars of rejection, loss, betrayal, and abandonment still sting and burn. At some point, this pain takes center stage in our lives.
The truth is that to love as Jesus loved leaves us with a major need for assistance for both spiritual and psychological transformation. The challenge is to take an honest tally of the people whom you find it hardest to love. To your dismay, you will find that there are some specific types. Can you continue loving someone when she or he shows their human weaknesses? Can you continue loving someone who makes a careless mistake or inconsiderate decision that causes you to lose something or someone dear to you?
What does it mean to love someone who repeats the same mistake? Does love mean you continue to support negative behavior or risk putting yourself or family in jeopardy? Can you truly love someone from a distance or must real love physically stay involved in daily life?
If there are no limits to our love, does that mean that we cannot create some boundaries for how we display it? What does it mean that “love never fails” (I Corinthians 13: 8)? Love requires a lot of patience, understanding, time, self-searching, forgiveness, and commitment. Christians are like all other humans, we have a long way to go before we can boast that we, “love everybody.”
We begin to be transformed when, one day, we stand a convicted criminal in front of a mirror and see ourselves. We are being transformed when we can suffer a great loss and not give in to the human need to blame someone to ease our pain.
Becoming a loving person is hard work. The work begins by telling the truth to ourselves.
Melinda Contreras-Byrd is a New Jersey state-licensed psychologist and owner of the Generations Center. The Center specializes in meeting the psychological and spiritual needs of all women, and both men and women of color. She has worked as a school psychologist in urban and suburban districts. She is a graduate of Rutgers University, The Graduate School of Applied & Professional Psychology, and the Princeton Theological Seminary. She is a published writer and poet, an ordained itinerant elder of the AME Church, and joins her husband, the Rev. Vernon R. Byrd, Jr. in pastoral ministry at St. Matthew AME Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
