THE FOURTH PRACTICAL STEP IN LOVING AND UNDERSTANDING PEOPLE.
4. JUST LIKE ME, THIS PERSON WISHES TO HAVE HIS NEEDS MET.
We are living in a world of needs, dire needs. If you ever face a need which we all do, love turns your needs into your resources. When next you see people in need, remember the moments you were in need. Go ahead and convert your memories of pain and lack into an energy to fuel your passion to help others. Whenever you remember your pain, your sorrow, your lack, that remembrance is always associated with some feelings. Now switch that around to recognize that, those people in pain before you right now, are presently experiencing what you had experienced. Hence, they also need the same intervention and help as you had once needed.
“You can talk with someone for years, every day, and still, it won’t mean as much as what you can have when you sit in front of someone, not saying a word, yet you feel that person with your heart, you feel like you have known the person for forever…. connections are made with the heart, not the tongue.” ― C. JoyBell C.
When you reach out to others in love like that, you convert your minus into a plus. Your negative energy, becomes a life giving positive energy in the lives of others. Love changes everything. The most horrible situations can become the most creative under the powerful watch of love. When you know that everyone you see in need is not to be abandoned, neglected or condemned, but to be given some amount of compassion thanks to your own experience of need, then you can ask yourself, what can I do to address the need of this person? The needs you see should spark your love, the lack around you should provoke your response. Needs around us should bring us closer to God. For God is love and anyone that loves, moves a little bit closer to the God of love Himself. So let your responses to other people’s needs be inspired by the love that you have for God and for men. Thanks to that love, you could ask yourself the question, how to best minister to the needs before you.
Even if it seems to you that you do not have anything to meet the needs of the people you see around you, you can still tell them the stories of how you overcame. You can share your stories with them. You can give them a word of encouragement. You could cheer them up. When we act in love, we get a little bit closer to God.
Dear friends, there are several other points I wish to share with you in this Series, but I will hold them back and share the remaining at another time. It is my hope that love would no more remain a vague doctrine and theory to you. I hope through this series you have been able to see the practicality in love. I hope your heart has been softened by the touch of love reaching you from these pages. I hope that from now on your response to the world around you is more constructive than ever, bringing solution rather than despair.
Today, no religion rivals Christianity, though one of the youngest of all the religions. The power of love has turned the world upside down in just 2000 years. The rules of the game have changed with the introduction of love. Nations are no longer how they used to be, while empires are all but history. Love replaces everything with itself.
It is my prayer that you submit yourself to an abandoned lifestyle of love. For he that loves, knows God. And he that loves not, does not know God, nor has he seen Him, for God is Love.
Thank you for joining us on this series of How to practically Love People, I hope you have been richly blessed and your Love life has been transformed. Another exciting and transforming series begins tomorrow. Please don’t miss it!!
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CHURCH AND NATION
By Pastor Sunday Adelaja
