Just the Good Stuff

My phone made the familiar ding, letting me know I had a Facebook notification. Thinking it was probably a comment on a post, I stopped what I was doing to check it out. Instead, it was a friend request from a woman I hadn’t seen or spoken to since high school. Excited to reconnect, I accepted her friend request. A few hours later, a message from her came through the Messenger app. She wanted me to host a party for her at-home business. She thought I’d be the perfect person to sell the same line of products.

Confession: I’m a Facebook junkie. I love reconnecting with old friends and nurturing new friendships via social media. Because I’m an army spouse, it’s the most efficient way to keep up with my friends and family members. But this sales-pitchy interaction left me somewhat jaded about who I accept as a friend or follower on social media. I don’t want to be “friended” for the sake of someone else’s gain; I just want to be friends.

Relationships Are Key

I’m currently studying John’s Epistles with a group of military wives using What Love Is by Kelly Minter as a guide. We range in age from our twenties to our fifties, and we’re all in various places in our spiritual development. During our discussion, my new friend, Marie, asked, “What if we just loved people? I think people know when we’re trying to turn them into Christians. It doesn’t feel genuine. What if we love them with no motive whatsoever?”

Marie’s words have stuck with me. Because I know her as someone who truly loves God and people, I look to her as an example of loving well. Her words are forcing me to look at the way I love those around me. Am I being genuine? Is the love I’m showing people real? What does real love look like? And what happens when I have to tell someone I love a painful truth?

A theme runs throughout 1 John that the apostle won’t let us forget: truth and love are inextricably linked. They cannot exist separately. When we have to hold truth and love together, relationships can get uncomfortable. Fortunately, we have Christ’s perfect example to follow.

What I love most about John’s Gospel and his epistles is the eyewitness accounting of Jesus’s life. John was one of Jesus’s closest friends. He knew the sound of his voice and had touched his hands. John followed Jesus everywhere, so it’s safe to say that he knew him even better than some of Jesus’s own family members knew him. They had a relationship based on personal knowledge of each other, and because of this relationship, I trust John to tell us the truth about who Jesus is.

What I also learned from studying 1 John is that because he knows the Christ, he has seen love embodied—not acts of love, but love personified. John knew what love looked like because he knew Jesus. It wasn’t complicated to him: look at Jesus, do what Jesus does, grow love.

The same is true for us. While we don’t have Jesus in front of us, we do have the accounts written by John, as well as those written by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The Gospels teach us how Jesus lived his life. His ministry was solely based on relationships. He called fisherman away from their nets and tax collectors up from their tables, and he loved them. No agenda, just love.

Eventually, because the apostles are human, too, they said and did things that weren’t Christlike. They wanted to know who was going to sit by Jesus in heaven and who was going to be the most important guy in the group. They shooed away children who wanted to meet Jesus. They chose themselves and their desires over his ways, but he always gently shared the truth with them. Because they knew they were loved by him, they were able to hear his truth and understand that it was spoken with their best interests in mind. While it must have been hard to hear the truth about their actions, the delivery was effective because it was accompanied by grace.

If this is true for the disciples, then it’s absolutely true for us. Surely relationships built on love mean that the time for truth-telling is gently spoken and tenderly received. When we love people simply because Jesus loves us, our own motives no longer exist. We don’t have to sell anything; we simply love.

Sharing the Good Stuff

Counter to the random Facebook friend from high school, I have a good friend who sells every direct-sales product you can imagine. My newsfeed is often reflective of this. I can buy face creams, leggings, and teeth-whitener in five minutes if I desire. From time to time another, more genuine friend sends me a message with a product to try. She knows me and my interests, so she knows what products I would benefit from or enjoy. Because we have a relationship, she knows and wants what’s good for me. She doesn’t care whether she makes money; she just wants to share the good stuff.

Let this be our heart’s desire in this month of love: that our hearts seek to love others and create relationships based solely on the fact that we were first loved by Love himself. That his love is so powerful and we are so filled with it that we have no choice but to pour it out on the people close to us.

Can we love without motive? Without agenda? Loving only because we’ve been loved so fully and so well? Because he first loved us, even when we were scraggly and broken? Can we share the truth so gently that our concern, rather than judgment, is received? We can, because we have the perfect example in Christ. Jesus is the good stuff.

Becky Yurisich is a full-time Army wife and mom, and an occasional teacher of first graders. She is an unapologetic follower of Jesus and the University of North Carolina Tar Heels. Becky holds a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from UNC, and dreams of writing a book. She blogs at beckyyurisich.com.

Photograph © Duy Pham, used with permission