Love Wastefully

            I’ve been reading Duke University Professor Lauren Winter’s new book, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. As she chronicles her journey of faith, she speaks of a story when she was preaching at a small Episcopal Church in upstate New York. As she was serving the Eucharist, she recalls. “What I learn is for a dozen years, an old man has been afflicted by a wasting disease, an intestinal disease that makes it almost impossible for him to eat. But at the altar, the old man takes the wafer and so does his wife. When I come to them with the chalice I say, ‘The Blood of Christ keep you in everlasting life’ and she eats her wafer, and then her husband likewise dips his round of Christ’s body into the blood of Christ and his wife eats the wafer for him. There she became Christ for him”

            I absolutely love that story. Where have we gotten as a culture? We are a people who enjoy the fast and simple, the quick and the easy. But God is the one who calls us to an intentional life. God calls us to worship God in a way that is meaningful and beautiful, majestic yet humble.

            When it comes time for us to go past this life into the Great Beyond, when we see our God and Maker, what might we look back on our life and see? Will we see that we were the Body of Christ for someone? Or will we find that we squandered our world in a meaningless way. We wasted for the sake of wasting.

            Let me challenge you this week, if you must waste, love wastefully. Love like you’ve never loved before. Love dangerously like you are staking everything on that love. There is the hope of the Gospel and everything that we believe.  When God is truly incarnate among us is when we love with such extravagance and grace.

C.S. Lewis in his novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in one of the iconic scenes of the book describes Susan sitting at the table with the beavers and Asland the Lion, who is the Christ figure-like in the book. Susan asks if the lion is safe, and the beavers reply, ‘he isn’t safe, but he is good’

People of faith, the God we believe in is in no way safe when it comes to our calling in life, but God’s love is perfect, and we can model our love after God’s. God offers us security, but he doesn’t want us to be safe with our love. As the song says, “God never said it was an easy road to travel, God only said you would never be alone.”

So when people ask what you are doing this week, tell them you are full of wasteful love and watch their reaction. We think of waste in such negative connotations, but in reality, God risks everything by loving us wastefully. May we all find consolation in that beautiful, humbling love. Thanks be to God.