Loving the Broken Soul.
People.
They are complex.
They can be difficult. Interesting. Unique.
Some are fountains of wisdom and love, and some are drains that pull and grasp and seek, desperately needing and wanting attention.
Each one is valuable. Each one has a soul, and each soul has an eternity. God calls us to love His people, and it's our only call. To love them--and everything else that we do and say and offer flows out from that love.
He calls us to see beyond the labels and the reputations. He gives us the spiritual vision to capture snapshots of each heart and to hold them close and safe, and to be a harbor for the hurting. People are valuable.
God gives us His passion that we can see beyond political stances. The extreme and subtle differences that so strikingly divide us in the mirror blur as we seek to understand and value the inside's soul.
The insecurity inside each of us fights against the call to love - saying, 'what about me? Who will fill me up?' The Lord faithfully answers that heart cry, too, as we sit at His feet daily and spend time with Him. Allowing Jesus to fill us up and then splash the overflow onto His people, we stay full by some miracle.
Occasionally we link with another soul who has that same heart cry. We look up--our gaze is met and held. We are filled with wonder as another deep place that we didn't dare mention, one that exists only in hope. It is the gift of a friend to walk alongside as we scoop up the broken and bring them back to Jesus side by side.
This soul-friend is the purest of gifts.
But we don't stop for too long because we keep going. Separate but united--knowing that, at least for this season, we also have a safe place to land at the end of each day.
So, we continue to put on our cloak of peace and push away our insecurities. God gives us a new, fresh vision, and we notice that some of the broken souls require more, so we dare to stop. We wait, and we love, and we walk next to them slowly, slowly walking and pushing back against society's call to be fast and to check the box and to move on.
No. We wait. We love. We pursue.
We sit in silence, and we make the silence comfortable because it's all okay. No matter what, the world is screaming, and no matter how fast the world is waving its worldly arms around, that should easily capture our attention. God blocks it out. Our faithful God blocks it all out.
We focus on the broken soul, and we sit. In silence. Because people matter, souls have eternity, and eternity is forever.
Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.