The first sentence in "The Message" is - Love from the center of who you are; don't fake it. Another says - Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle. Those words caught my eye right off and I thought, we need friends like that and we need to be that kind of friend to others. What a difference it would make everywhere we went and everything we
did.
God commands us to love one another all throughout Scripture, it's not just something He wants us to do once in a while, it's something He wants as a way of life.
Face it, it's not easy to always love each other. Who wants to love a person who treats us badly or says nasty things? Well, we might not want to, but God does. He commands that. And loving those people isn't easy because we often like to love only our happy close friends. And again that isn't what God says.
He says it's ok to share in our friends happiness, but also to cry with them when they cry. Be a good listener and pay attention to who and where they are. And don't be haughty when we love because we aren't any better, we're all equal in God's eyes.
And lastly, we can't forget to ask God to help us through these things. We just can't do without Him. With Him inside us and beside us, we can learn to love each other as He loves us.
