Love

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness. The fruit of the Spirit is faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

If you've ever been taught about the fruit of the Spirit from me, you might have read that to a melody that is stuck in your head. If you've really made this teacher's heart sing, then you were doing some sign language along with it. 

I think that the fruit of the Spirit are the most useful words to know and learn about from the New Testament. The Bible doesn't deal with all the issues that we deal with today, apart from application of the fruit of the Spirit. I mean that we cannot always take our contemporary social and personal problems to scripture and count on Paul, or even Jesus himself, to tell us what is wrong and what is right. We can, however, read scripture and learn what it looks like when the Holy Spirit is involved. It looks like more love, more patience, more peace, joy, and self-control. . .

This is why I will be using the fruit of the Spirit as a structure to contemplate how the Spirit is involved in my pursuit of this trip to Namibia. For this post, I begin with love; I begin with my favorite passage about love, from the first letter of John, chapter 4: verses 7-18.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and His love is perfect in us.

By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent His Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. 

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. . .

Anything that we learn about love is something we are learning about the character of our Creator, and the character of the creation made in God's image. Made in the image of God, we are the only creature with the ability to love creation the way God loves creation. I intend to let this love transform me. I am not set in stone; this I am counting on.

What I am most looking forward to about this trip is being part of the global Church. I want to meet my brothers and sisters in Christ, my family who, though we are distant and different, we share a deep bond and trust in the same hope that keeps us persevering for a better standard of life for everyone. This connection boggles me sometimes, that I feel so deeply connected to these communities I will be visiting, thanks only to God's love. This love empowers me, and I feel no fear setting out to know my Church.