Surrender to Love: "Faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

Family will make you weak,
Family makes you soft and vulnerable,
Family exposes you to pain, suffering, embarrassment and loss,
They come into your heart, take space and plant the seeds of something dangerous: love.

That love is wonderful beyond description,
it shines brilliantly, brighter than the sun, and you cannot look away.
You don't want to look away, because you know, that this beautiful gift is finite, and so, will be lost.
Although it cannot be grasped, we desperately yearn to restrain the joy, beauty, tenderness of the love, which we call the moment. We try...

Family brings into our lives all things worthwhile and simultaneously vulnerability to the worse pain imaginable.
You cannot love without vulnerability.

Family is a path to the greatest joy and most terrifying defeat.
To love is to be vulnerable.
We show our desires, and inner self and ask to be let in, into their self,
we risk rejection, and welcome loss.

But... there is no greater pursuit, NO greater reward, NO more necessary a risk.
Life without love, is safe, but far worse than dangerous, it is also empty.
We were made to love. Risk everything and be vulnerable.
Love with abandon. Do not hold back.

1 Corinthians 13 (NIV)

13 If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Footnotes:
1 Corinthians 13:1 Or languages
1 Corinthians 13:3 Some manuscripts body to the flames

My Prayer:

Lord help me to love with abandon, to surrender self to the celebration of the moment, not for its own sake but for the gift from You that it is. Help me to cherish the family that so often hurts me, and who I too often hurt back, so that I might learn, like Jesus, to love better, fuller, and sacrificially.

Lord teach me, lead me, love me. Jesus family is the greatest challenge and most unimaginable and undeserved gift, thank you for the challenge and the joy. Help me to love and serve those you put before me, as you would have me.

I pray these things in Jesus name, amen.