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Owe Your Love

As a young adult, just heading to college, I remember some advice my dad gave me; “Don’t get a credit card. You’ll never get out of it.” I didn’t asked him much about this advice or rather, warning, but I had a feeling he knew a thing or two about this.

I wish I could say I listened. Instead I made plans with new found friends to head to Florida for Spring Break. My tax refund check didn’t come soon enough, so I filled out the easy application that magically appeared in my dorm mailbox and drove off to Florida with a piece of plastic in my pocket worth $3000.

I wish I could say I’ve never had any debt, especially from a high interest credit card, but I have. And at times, I’ve felt like I could drown from the weight of it.

But that really isn’t the worst of it. My relationship with debt was distracting me from the rich relationship I could have been having with my heavenly Father. It was keeping me strapped to a monthly payment I wanted to give away to someone in need. I was kept from loving people the way I wanted to and reflecting the generous love I’ve received from God through his gift of Jesus Christ.

Paul instructs in Romans 13:8 to, “Owe nothing to anyone – except for your obligation to love one another.” And in my pursuit to love others in this life, in the same generous and lavish way God loves me, I fulfill God’s law to love Him and love others.

Being free from owing someone something other than my love for them frees me to love them deeply, to really invest in them and not just with money, but with my time, my attention, with the eternal part of me that will give the opportunity to share the Good News of Christ. If I’m busy paying off debt or worried about matching someone’s generosity, that becomes my focus, that becomes what I think about, that becomes the biggest part of me. It is a trap, a prison, a lonely place that does not align with a free and full life that God has dreamed for me.

Are you caught up in what you owe men? Consider and pray how to be rid of this and be free to spend yourself in the lives of people, loving them out of obligation to the One who showed us what love is.

Practicing Resurrection

“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute … Give your approval to all you cannot understand … Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years … Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts … Practice resurrection.”
 - The Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry

I’m turning these words of Wendell Berry over in my head, over and over again and then going back to Jesus’ words from John 12, “The man who loves his life will lose it…” and I get this puff of air caught somewhere in my chest. It’s full of what is hard to stomach about this terrible advice I hold as truth. It’s full of hesitation of what I know I should do and all I want instead.

But I go back to these words of Jesus and Berry and wonder again and again at the freedom that lies here.

I see not everything has to make sense to me. I see what seems like foolishness, is actually worth living for. The loss of all that want frees me to grow into who I was intended to be.

To not understand, but sink down into fertile soil because that is the way to eternal life, is an adventure.

To consider all I know (and it’s not as much as I think), to follow Christ anyway into the resurrected life, can seem like failure to a world that clings to facts, to knowledge, to what is seen. But as Berry suggests, I can laugh. And as Christ declares, God’s name will be glorified.

So how will I live? In the safe world of facts and the fearsome world of opinion?

No – live like a wheat seed, sacrificially covered in the rich goodness of truth, waiting for the promise of something it cannot see. Refuse to live a life all for yourself, unsure of what you will look like, how much fruit may come or how you will benefit, not paralyzed by fear– live a transformed and resurrected life, live for the One, live to declare the glory of our God.