Loving Our Neighbors

Noah had his yearly visit to the pediatrician last week. Our pediatrician's office requires masks for everyone two years and older, so we put ours on and had fun taking pictures and making secret silly faces under them while we waited.

Even though I think he looks adorable in his little race car mask, if I'm being honest, it twists my heart up to see him in one. Masks are one of the few tools we have to keep us from accidentally spreading the virus to others in our community, and so we wear them. But it's sobering to think that my kind, nurturing three-year-old is capable of harming others, even if unintentionally or unknowingly.

But seeing him in a mask is also a reminder to me that in this pandemic he has been given the exact same capacity as his 30-year-old mother to love others, to do what is hard and uncomfortable to lay down his life for them.

In commanding us to love our neighbor as ourselves, Jesus is leading us into a vulnerable position, no question. It's one that he is intimately familiar with, one that he walked willingly that led him to the cross. There will always be a cost to following Jesus and loving as he did, but his resurrection made a way for joy in the midst of the weakness and limitation that sacrifice exposes.

In asking us to follow him in laying down our lives, Jesus is not ultimately trying to take something from us. Instead, he desires to give us something in the midst of sacrifice, an invitation into life in the way of Jesus, to take hold of the "life that is truly life."