First thoughts on love
Piglet once famously asked Pooh as in Winnie the Pooh how you spell the word ‘LOVE’ and Pooh replied ‘you don’t spell it…. you feel it’ and I guess we would all maybe start there in our thoughts on ‘LOVE’ that it is a feeling. My favourite quote from Winnie the Pooh on the subject of ‘LOVE’ is however a little different…. it goes like this:
“I don’t feel very much like Pooh today,"
said Pooh.
"There there," said Piglet.
"I’ll bring you tea and honey until you do.”
I love the idea of ‘LOVE’ that says I am with you whatever you may be going through right now and I will always see the best in you…..I love it because I think it reflects the ‘LOVE’ God has for us. You may remember the story of Jonah who God asked to travel to a very wicked city to remind them that God loved them and that the path they were on at the moment was heading towards destruction. Jonah reluctantly goes and gives them God’s message and then is beside himself with fury when the city as a whole does respond and turns from their wicked ways and back towards God’s ‘LOVE’. Thomas Carlyle wrote these amazing words in response to the story of Jonah……
”And Jonah stalked
To his shaded seat
And waited for God
To come round to his way of thinking
And God is still waiting for a host of Jonahs
In their comfortable houses
To come around
To His way of loving”
So why a photo of Teville Gate you might ask…… any Worthing-ites will know how much discussion there has been about this site. Recently our Council has announced that they plan to knock the car park down in an effort to spark the developers into action. GREAT NEWS!! However I was sad to read a comment by local person who asked that there be no housing in the scheme because our Docters’ Surgeries, Hospital and Schools etc were already over subscribed! The one thing we so desperately need here in Worthing and all along the South Coast is affordable housing. Maybe those of us already housed need to be willing to put up with a little inconvenience for the sake of others…….. isn’t that ‘LOVE’?
A couple of weeks ago I was honoured to meet a lady who to me personifies what ‘LOVE’ looks like. She gave me this gift………… it might not look like much - a bucket, some second hand gardening shoes, a trowel and fork, some plant labels and a small bag of good soil! What they represented to her was her dream of helping with the garden projects that Storm does around the town and the gardens in the home where she lives. But at 96 and after a couple of nasty falls she had reluctantly decided that her dreams were beyond her. However she is not one to sit back and feel sorry for herself but wanted to give her treasured possessions to our gardening team so that we could carry her dream forward.
So I am thinking as we conclude our first thoughts on ‘LOVE’ it is mostly about giving and giving sacrificially for the sake of others. Giving of our time, our possessions, our convenience for others, for our community, for ‘LOVE’.
‘This is how we know what LOVE is:Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters’ 1 John 3.16