Learning to Love Within The Chaos of Life
Picture this... You’re visiting downtown Chicago for a work engagement. The time is now 7:00 am. Your hotel alarm goes off, you hop out of bed and make your way to the window to open the curtains. The first thing you see is the enormous skyscraper across the street which exudes productivity from several offices. People are starting to man their workstations and pound away at the keyboard. It’s as if you’re watching a factory conveyor belt manned by robotics. You take your gaze upward and find the office building giving way to an even larger one behind it.
You shake your head back to reality, stretch and proceed to prepare for the day…
Now, the time is 7:45 am. You’ve showered and just finished breakfast. As you step outside and prepare to walk the seven blocks to the conference center, you realize you haven't genuinely engaged with anyone this morning. You lift your chin, dawn a smile and begin to look for human interaction.
From here, the first two blocks go by and you begin to feel perplexed...
You've passed several individuals and more than half were within arm’s reach of a “hello”; however, none of them even noticed your existence. You realize eight of them were zoned out while wearing ear buds. Four of them were engaged in phone conversations. Three of them were standing on the curb waving down the next available cab driver. Two of them were standing at a stop light scrolling through their social media feeds. And, just about then, you realized you saw the last two individuals out of the side of your eye in a nearby alleyway...
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Curiously, you begin to dig deeper into what your peripheral witnessed and recall a homeless mother with her three year old boy. They were eating what little food they could gather in nearby trash can. The mother embraced the little boy as if she was trying to keep him safe from the chaos flying by them.
No one seemed to even notice them. Not even you...
You stop in your tracks to fight the weakening in your knees and tears now welling up inside. It's then you realize, we're missing out... We are missing out on life as God created it to be.We are too busy taking every worldly distraction we can find and shoving it down our throats at break neck speed: Cell phones, televisions, magazines, professional sporting events, and endless high-tech hobbies... The list goes on and on.
It is all blurring our ability to see with 20/20 vision.
We stop greeting one another, we stop listening, we stop caring, and we stop loving. God didn’t create us to see how packed we can get our distraction meters and, consequently, our hearts. He created us to leave them empty and pure… All so He could fill them to an overflowing love; a love which causes us to truly commune with Him and each other as His Beloved. We have to remember Jesus came to show us love as God intended...We have to embrace Ecclesiastes 1:2 and 1 Corinthians 13:1 in such a way that we completely empty our hearts and fill them with sacrificial love. It’s through this kind of love where we begin to truly live. It’s this kind of love which will cause us to stop and buy a fresh loaf bread for that loving mother and her son. It's this kind of love which propels us to slow down and be intentional in our relationships.It's time to begin learning to love within the chaos of life. May the LORD draw you out of distraction and into loving community with others today.