Humanity – Page 3 – Kiwichurch

Love

What is the purpose of life?

When all is stripped away, when money is laid aside, when aspirations are lost, or found, when life begins, and when it ends, what’s it all about? What’s it all for?

Love.

Paul, in the Bible, describes love. He says it is patient, and kind – it doesn’t envy, or boast. Love never fails. Life is meaningless without love.

But what is love?

Is love that attraction you feel for that guy over there, or that girl? Is it that power within that might lead you to die protecting that little girl, or boy? Is it the power of friendship: of helping one another – of listening to one another, and sharing in each other’s joys and struggles?

All of these things, and more.

There is a deeper kind of love: there is a deeper searching for love.

There is God.

Beyond our human kind of love, vital in its own right, needed in life, and in death, is God’s kind of love.

God’s love is all encompassing, and all-consuming. It demands our all, and in turn gives us our all back again, though changed.

To gain God’s kind of love, we need to give up our lives: in order to truly gain them.

Love is an offering: love is the source and reason for life.

God is Love.

There are two reasons for living – two callings greater than we are in life, that Jesus gave to us:

Love God, and love humanity – even our enemies.

Love: it’s the only way to truly live.

‘Love your enemy.’

Sometimes the most profound self-defence can lead to an even more violent defeat.

We need to learn to love our enemies: they are human too, with the same vulnerabilities, the same weaknesses; the same fears.

‘Love your enemies,’ so that all of us can live together in peace.

Masculinity and Femininity

Here’s a meaty topic: masculinity and femininity – what’s it all about? What do kiwis say? What does Christianity say?

What makes a man a man, and a woman a woman? I’d say in some ways, in some situations, both masculinity and femininity have been quite seriously beaten up.

What do you say? What does it mean to be a man or a woman?

What is humanity?

Sometimes we lift others up; sometimes we pull them down.
Sometimes we understand: sometimes we don’t see the limitations of our own understanding.
Sometimes we show kindness; sometimes we show self-defence.
Sometimes we assert; sometimes we block – and sometimes we just don’t give a toss.

There is a time to love, and a time to hate: but sometimes we hate all too easily.

What is humanity, but dust in the wind?
Sometimes we are but dust, blown in the wind:
Blown by the forces of our own vulnerabilities.
Yet what a profound chemisty takes place, when dust is raised by Light…
When the inanimate is infused with life.

There is a time to love…even a time to love our enemy.
There is a time to hate…even a time to hate our own weaknesses.
There is a time to fall…
And then there is a time to get back up again.

What is dust, but potential?
What is death, but a chance for a greater life?