The Man I Love

Originally published on The Nameless Valley Blogger (29 Mar 2014)

  I am in love with a man.  Shocking right? You might not want to hear about it but I would like to tell you about the man I love. This man I am in love with is older, by about 2000 years.  He is smart. He seems to know everyone and everything and anything that anyone has ever done.  Armed with that knowledge you would think he would be extremely judgmental and have a low opinion of humanity, I mean imagine the evil he has seen.  Really it is quite the opposite. He loves people, every last one of us.   His capacity to love people is amazing. He even loves those sinners; you know the ones, the 7 billion of them that inhabit this planet.

The man I love is kind.  He stands up for the poor and the oppressed.  He forgives wrongdoers, even the ones who have done wrong directly to him.  He would never throw a rock at someone as a punishment for their lifestyle, and he would never, ever, protest the funeral of a soldier to further a hate filled agenda. Again, the man I love does not hate people, he loves them.

That is not to say he is passive or permissive.  One of the things I love about him is that he knows right from wrong, it’s almost like he wrote the rules himself.  He calls me out when I’m wrong, and I am wrong a lot.  That is not judgment or condemnation. That is accountability.  He does not condone sin.  People seem to have this idea that because he hangs around with sinners that he is totally cool with sin. He is not. But the man I love would rather be a bright light for us than shine a bright light on us and all of our junk.

This wonderful man, I’ll call him “J”, he loves children.  He loves their minds, their hearts, and their ability to believe.  It saddens him when children suffer.  He wants every child to be loved and fed, and that is much more important than who happens to be holding the spoon.  I know, hard to imagine.  He just cares that much.

The thing is, and this is the thing that made me fall in love with him in the first place, “J” values love above all other things.  He loves us and wants us to love each other.  In fact, you know that old saying ‘love thy neighbor?’ He made that up!  If you want to know who your neighbor is, watch the movie “Gravity” starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.  When you see the big blue ball they orbit around, just know that everyone who lives on that ball is your neighbor, everyone.

I am sure by now you have figured out that the man I love is Jesus.  Maybe you love him too, maybe you don’t.  Maybe you would like to meet him and maybe you think he doesn’t even exist. That is your prerogative.   The purpose of this post is not to convert you to Christianity or try to “shove religion down your throat.” I am simply saddened by the misrepresentation of Christ in our culture.  Extremists on the right and on the left have propped up Jesus as a symbol of their cause when nothing could be further from the truth.  Jesus does not pick sides because all of humanity is of concern to him.  He does not rank sins in order of most to least heinous because to a perfect God all sin is the same.   He does not wave a red flag or a blue flag because believe it or not he is not even American! 

Jesus is love. He wants to take away your sins, not your sensibilities.