On Loving Well

Why did God choose my particular testy? Testy is that person in your life that you find difficult to love. Not the person whom you could really hate, the impossible one, the foe. But testy is the problem person that aggravates, disappoints, challenges in every way. In my Bible study, it says God uses these people to "complete something lacking in us. If we never learn to allow the character of Christ and His love to flow through us to those persons, then they were placed in our lives for nothing but pain and no gain." The idea that God chose these particular people to be in our lives is at first upsetting. For me, as well as a lot of other people, the testy person is in our immediate family. So we're around them, a lot. And we have certain expectations when they are family: they should be easy to love, they should find it easy to love us, they should accept us as we are. If we are honest with ourselves, we may discover that they have the same issues with us: we may not meet their expectations, fulfill their needs as a loved one. Whose to say which came first, their disappointment, or ours?

But when we begin to love them, we reach deeper into God's love, the love God wants to share with us and all those around us. I believe I felt this recently, when I prayed earnestly, not for my testy, but for my foe, the person who hurt me more than anyone else, ever. I prayed for his health and happiness, for his soul to be delivered to Heaven and for him to feel my love. When I finished my prayer, a feeling came over me and seemed to fill me. It was a glimpse of God's love, the pure love that is God. It was a passing moment, not long. I believe it was brief because my love is still growing, not mature yet. Some day, when I love better, I'll feel the love of God even more.

What have I learned from God's word about loving different types of people? Likely, each of us is a combination of all types of people rolled into one person. We are someone's testy, someone's foe, someone's joy to love. There are many who don't even know us. We want the opportunity to turn everyone's heart to accept us and begin to love us as God does. So if that's what we want, we should be willing to give it to others.