Variety: 1 John 4v7

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God”.  (1 John 4:7)

If our only goal is to love, there is no such thing as failure. 

We are invited to encounter a love that just keeps opening to us, and then pass on the same by “opening and opening” to the increasingly larger world around us, willingly falling into the “bright abyss,” where all weighing and counting are unnecessary and even burdensome.  

We are invited to live in the nonsensical economy of grace, where two plus two equals a hundred and deficits are somehow an advantage. Such transformation of the soul, both in the inflowing and in the outflowing, is the experiential heart of the gospel. 

The mystery of the cross is that both the receiving of love and the letting go of it for others are always a very real dying to our present state. Whenever we choose to love we will—and must—die to who we were before we loved. So, we often hold back. Our former self is taken from us by the object of our love. We only realize this is what’s happened after the letting go, or we would probably always be afraid to love.  

True growth in holiness is a growth in willingness to be loved and to love.