The Way of Love Loving
By Andrea Lingle
The swings squeak back and forth as we stand behind our respective children.
“I work for a small foundation out of Texas,” I reply.
“Oh, really?” I know it’s coming. I do. It always does. “What foundation?”
“The Missional Wisdom Foundation. We are a small non-profit that walks alongside those working to create nurturing communities of spiritual growth in normal places.”
“Oh, nice.”
And that’s where it stops. Most of the time. Once in a while someone will ask a follow up question.
“Why?” That one is easy. Because Jesus asked us to love God, our neighbor, and ourselves. Full stop. Just love.
“How?”
And that’s the one that is hard to articulate. Well, we use church buildings to make space for fledgling businesses, chefs, artists, therapists, and musicians.
How is that loving people? Isn’t that just a business? Admittedly, it is hard to explain. We don’t require our partners to attend a service or Bible study. We don’t have a doctrinal statement or count baptisms. We do have a Rule of Life, but our partners don’t have to adopt it to join one of our projects. We believe that what we do is evangelism. Why? Because evangelism is communicating the Good News.
No megaphone or dotted lines required.
What is the good news? That God loves the world. All of Reality. The Oaks of Mamre, the Cedars of Lebanon, the Grand Canyon, the blue whale, the farthest nebulae, and you. God loves it all. Now, I have come to believe that “God loves” is a redundant statement. God is love loving, so, “God loves you,” is basically the equivalent of saying Chai Tea.
Love loves.
By default.
But what does it mean to be loved by love? It obviously doesn’t mean that nothing bad ever happens or everything goes your way. It doesn’t mean feeling happy. It doesn’t mean that you will always win. It doesn’t even mean that you will never feel alone.
Much like cosmologists looking at the spectra of starlight and trying to infer the shape and character of the star-spangled universe, theologians must work to infer what IS from what is. What is the character of the Well-Spring of Spirit? What is the nature of Love Loving? What moves you to tears? What nourishes your soul? What is laced with joy?
Follow those things. Investigate them. Walk with them. They are the impression of the Divine.
For me, pushing a wee-small on the swing, it is the answer to how the Missional Wisdom Foundation engages in telling the Good News. We listen to the snips and bits of life that flow through our projects. Slowly. At the pace of walking.
We inhabit our spaces deeply trusting that the work of evangelism does not originate with us, but, rather, springs out of the deep water-table of love undergirding us all.