Reflection - Love One Another

by Paul Wetzig, Mission Accompanying Team

For those who've been following the 40 days of prayer over the last 6 weeks, in preparation for our 38th Synod taking place this weekend, you will have encountered the following themes:

• Abundance: An Extravagant Gift of Love
• Readiness: Ready for Renewal
• God’s Story, Our Story: Hope Growing
• The Vine and The Branches
• The Sower and the Seeds
• Light in the Darkness.

These themes have invited us to prayerfully open our hearts and our lives and ask God to renew us, as his people, for the season ahead.

As we come to this week of gathering and discernment about God's path for us into the future, the Lectionary reading for Sunday is John 13:31-35. Verse 35, taken here from the Message translation, reads:

Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.

What a beautiful reminder to be given for all the conversations we'll have, the decisions we'll make, the challenges we face together over the coming week.

If we are a people who practice the way of Jesus together, all of these things done as a community will be marked by:

• love willing to let go of power and take the place of a servant
• love willing to let go of barriers and divisions and generously embrace those who are "other"
• love willing to resist the desire to preserve itself and sacrifice everything to create a new community open to all, even those who would betray, mock and destroy.

I wonder what this challenge "to love one another" sparks inside you as you recall your own experience of, and embrace by, this love.

How might God be inviting you to approach others this week, and beyond, as we seek to more fully live this command; becoming a radically generous community transformed by, and known for, the love we now share with the world.

Whatever the answers to these questions, maybe this is what the first fruits of renewal looks like.

As you take a moment to pause and reflect on what it might mean for you to embrace this way of Jesus more fully, you might like to use this song The Greatest Commandment by Paul Zach and the Porter's Gate to help centre your prayer of response on this invitation Jesus gives us to love.

You might also like to take a moment and find for yourself a small object you can carry with you through the week to serve, when you notice it, as a reminder of the invitation to love; to help to bring you back to the transformational love of God you have encountered, and stir you to now embody that love in the midst of whatever lies in front of you.