Love Looks Around
On our drive today, I was listening to a podcast (Typology) interviewing Sarah Thebarge (author of The Invisible Girls and Well) and she shared the story of the deep wisdom of her driver when she was serving in Togo. She shared that as they talked about how people could not be seen even in their deepest need, he simply said, “Love looks around.” It was one of those moments that I needed to hold on to and the rest of the day and into tonight I have kept those three words in my heart and in my mind. Love looks around. This is after she shared her view that the opposite of fear is love. And those all come together with so much truth to them - fear both literally and figuratively limits our view. It limits what we see to what we feel we need to see and we miss everything but that which we are focused upon. But when we live with love as our driving force, suddenly our world widens. Our perspective widens. Our heart widens. Our compassion widens. Our grace widens. We widen.Thebarge shared that she regularly goes back to 1 John 4:18-
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.
I love taking panorama pictures of scenes like this sunrise. There’s no way to capture the fullness of the sky and the water and the color and the clouds and the sun with just a single frame. But instead a shot like this is made up of about 20 frames stitched together to make this single shot that captures so much more. Is it the whole? No its not but it gets a lot closer than just the one limited shot.Love looks around. I’m going to remember those words. I am going to try to seek to live those words. I'm going to remember that love sees not just the self but the other. Love sees the immigrant and the refugee, the parent and the child. Love sees those we agree with and those with whom we disagree. Love looks around.Thank you Sarah.