"God Sought Me Out"

I don't need to share all the details, but Susan has had enough terrible experiences in her own life to equal that of five other people who we'd describe as having rough lives. I hope that sentence makes sense.... she's had an incredibly difficult life. To go along with these two posts, 1 and 2, she's been to various gutters.

As she's gotten older, Susan has begun to sense that God was trying to find a way back into her life. As a result of her life situation, however she had no way of trying to seek out God on her own. So she was left with this lingering question, "how was God going to find me?"

Almost one year ago, while hanging out at the bar in which she spends a lot of her time, Susan felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to see the smiling face of Sara Weems, one of the members of TFC's Love Wins: LGBT ministry. That act of a hand on a shoulder lead to Susan, almost a year later, choosing to give her heart to Christ. Looking back on the development of her relationship with the Love Wins team and the response to the love of Christ she knew was somehow seeking her out, Susan describes that hand on her shoulder as "the hand of God" and the fact that some Christians would leave their comfort zone and choose to enter a gay bar for the sake of building relationships that would share Jesus' love with the bar patrons as "God seeking me out."

I would describe it as Incarnation; the act of God putting on flesh. We celebrate the incarnation of Jesus every Christmas. As followers of the Jesus who chose to become human so as to introduce us to the love of God, we also are to incarnate the love of God. We are the flesh and bones of God's love and we're to take that love to the people who don't yet know that love.

We aren't all called to gay bars but we are all, every single person who claims to follow Christ, called to incarnate the love of Jesus for the people with whom we interact. And following the same act of self-giving that Paul describes in Philippians 2, we're to take the love of Jesus (embodied in our very person) to places that are out of our comfort zone and outside of the regular path of most Christ-followers.