Day 11: Learning to Love Others

 

  If we find loving ourselves hard at times, we'll find loving others to be even harder. We are commanded throughout the Bible to put others before ourselves and love our neighbors as ourselves. 1 Corinthians 13 drives home the point that love is the greatest thing we can give. Colossians 3:12 calls us to clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, and gentleness. Something that I have learned as I am being molded to reflect Christ is that loving people that love you back and are kind to you is a heck of a lot easier than loving people who are rude or who could care less about you or even people you don't even know that you're just too exhausted to show some love to.
   Awhile back I wrote a post about how learning to love like Jesus means loving selflessly, without asking for anything in return. And boy, if I thought that I was being challenged to love selflessly about a summer ago, I had no idea what was around the corner this year. Just to give you some brief background info, I currently work as a barista at a coffeeshop. It's not my first pick for my recent post graduate life but I'm learning to be grateful for it and make the most out of it. I've discovered that on some days, I can find people very frustrating. I know, it's awful. I had no idea that people I barely knew could make me so easily annoyed. Yet, they have. When you have customers complaining about things that you think are not worth complaining about, it's very difficult to be gracious. When you have a rush and you're either up front on register, on bar or drive thru, it's hard to sound pleasant to your customers.
  These things, do not come easy. I am extremely grateful that Christ works in our hearts to help us to clothe ourselves with compassion and gentleness when our sleepy selves would much rather bark back at the woman who comes in and says she asked that her triple, skinny vanilla latte be iced not hot (even though, you've repeated her order back to her, twice) I am grateful that we are given the Holy Spirit to help us recall scriptures we've learned that we can say over and over again in our head as the line gets long to help fight the temptation to tell the next person that walks in the door to "go home".
     In life there will always be people that are hard to love whether they be co-workers, fellow classmates, aquaintances, or the people you are serving. It will be Christ's power in you that will give you the heart to love and the words to speak. Christ's power in you can help you be gentle on the days you're exhausted and the word "gentle" seems well...foreign to you.

Here are a few scriptures I like to remember on the days that loving others doesn't come easy, I hope they can help you too:

-Colossians 3:12-16
-Colossians 3:3-4
-Philippians 4:8
-Philippians 2:3-8
-Ephesians 5:1-2
-Ephesians 5:15-16