The Dark & Stormy 🌊

Let's stop withholding love. ♥️

Letting go of gatekeeping & embracing love:

We don’t get to determine who deserves kindness, empathy, and love.

This feels self-explanatory, and yet, I’ve noticed a startling increase in Christians hesitating to care for marginalized people groups, making fun of them, and even pushing them further to the margins.

Rather than sharing money, time, or food with someone in financial need, we make assumptions that their need was created out of laziness.

Rather than sitting with victims of abuse or trauma, we question whether they were partially responsible for their pain by being in certain situations.

Rather than be concerned about the staggering rates of suicide within—and violence towards members of—the LGBTQ+ community, we make jokes about “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

Rather than showing up for hurting people, seeking to understand their pain, and walking with them through it, we worry if meeting those needs will signal our alignment with their beliefs or decisions.

Why are we so often more concerned about not aligning with people on the margins than we are about aligning with the gospel, which calls us to radical love?

For a faith centered on caring for the poor, hurting, and marginalized, we spend an alarming amount of our time and energy determining whether those same people are in alignment with our beliefs before we extend compassion.

We get stuck in theological debates and hot-headed arguments about love versus acceptance and neglect to do the very thing our faith is built upon: loving people.

We’ll allow people to sit in our pews, but we’ll only invite them into community if they live and vote in ways we deem theologically acceptable.

We profess love for all while only fully embodying that welcome when people conform to our standards of faith, work, or sexuality.

But that’s not love at all.

This worship of conformity isn’t Christlike, nor is it a new phenomenon. But it also isn’t the compassion of Jesus nor the kindness that calls people to him.

The call to love, welcome, and care for others—people beloved by God—in Jesus’ name is not contingent upon whether we deem them worthy of our care.

So, in this month focused on affection, may we refocus our energy spent gatekeeping and use it to show up with radical, Christlike kindness for all people.

February Book Recommendation:

If you’ve ever read the comments section of a controversial video or post, you know how tightly people can cling to their opinions—even when said opinions clearly aren’t based in truth.

It’s easy to assume we’re absolutely right on a subject—such as who deserves love, acceptance or belonging—based solely on our experiences or limited information. As we begin to consider other people’s experiences and objective truth, however, our brains relearn based on truth and our empathy deepens. My favorite resource for relearning has been Think Again by psychologist Adam Grant.

February Blog Preview:

As a follow up to today’s post, this month’s blog will offer 5 practical ways to live out love. To receive the post straight to your inbox, you can subscribe here.