The Opening...

So, let me start off by saying thank you for reading this post.


The blogs you will read here now and in the future (hopefully) will mostly be a collections of thoughts and ideas from a relatively dry and sarcastic 23 year old guy. I know tone is difficult to pick up on in a blog, but I will try to make it very clear.


My girlfriend tells me that I am making this blog in an attempt to become popular/famous and that I need to not be so conceited...I told her that it is not being "popular"...it is sharing the Gospel with as many people as possible...not conceited at all.


I found myself today standing in one of my favorite stores inside the local mall surrounded by thousands of people. I was "daydreaming", aka staring at a shirt looking like I had something wrong with me. It was a simple shirt, a blueish v neck but on this shirt it had the word "Love" printed near the bottom in a fancy cursive writing. I began to think, we wear love on a shirt, we fall in love with just about anything that promises to offer content to us, regardless of the actual success rate of whatever it is we are placing our hope in, but do we really know what love is? Let me share with you one of my favorite quotes regarding love:

"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."  C.S. Lewis

This quote contains great truth. Love is not an affection, we can fake affections. A small child can step on our toe and instead of displaying our true displeasure, we smile and "shake it off" not to offend the young one. Simply put, we fake affection.


Love is real. I love a lot of things in my life. I love cherry sprite, I love the Atlanta Braves, I love my family. In context of the Lewis quote, if I love my family, and for some reason the ultimate good of my family could only be reached, if they pushed me away from them...would I scream and shout for them to push me away? That is hard.


How does this come back to the mall? I think myself, and often all believers struggle with sharing the Gospel/showing the love of Christ, because of the fear that it will end up going badly for us. We need not to be people who make much of ourselves... we need to make much of Christ and show His love to those who desperately need to know! If that means taking a risk of being rejected and looking "foolish"...is it not worth it? It is like winning the lottery, when you tell your friends they call you a liar and a lunatic...but you have actually won the lottery...it ends well for you! We share the love of Christ with other because He commanded us to, and if that leads to suffering here, we still have the hope of eternity with Christ...is that not what we are looking forward too anyway...


Peace