Blogger Brett

Hey everybody in blogger land! This is actually the first blog post I’ve written in my entire life… so that’s my excuse if you think its bad. Anywhoo…

I just wanted to share some thoughts and a little personal testimony about the talk I gave last Tuesday at CAM about loving others.

First of all, God never lets me give a challenge to people from His word without giving me an opportunity to practice what I preach. So knowing that I figured somewhere along the line I would be challenged with the task of loving someone just as I love myself. A simple enough task you may think… until you really think about how much time you spend on yourself.

Ok so here it is. I’m working away on my talk for Tuesday when I get interrupted by a friend needing to chat. That’s fine, but it better not take long I’m thinking. Come to find out my friend was really struggling with some things and just needed someone to talk it through with.

I had two options: 1. Tell him that I couldn’t talk because he was distracting me from learning about loving others and I really needed to focus. (yeah I know, makes a lot of sense)
Or 2. Exercise my love muscles and take some time to listen to what he needed help with and offer some encouragement.

I tend to catch on to things slowly, so it was a good thing I had been studying about loving others for awhile. God basically thumped me over the head with all these verses I had been reviewing and said, “Are ya serious Brett? Why is there even a question in your mind about what you should do?”

So I sat and listened to my friend and gave whatever encouragement I could to him. And I tell ya… I learned more about loving others that night than all my other study times combined.

To be honest it wasn’t very difficult to love in this situation, but it got me thinking about if this wasn’t a friend or if I had something more pressing I needed to do. That’s the challenge for me. Can I put me aside and lift others up even when it hurts? Jesus did.

If you want to read more about what God says about love I would check out the book of 1st John. (especially chapter 4)

-Brett