Color-full Love
Because love always wills the good of others
Shouting about immigration through a partisan megaphone is easy. Creating and implementing immigration policy is not easy. Its many complex layers of legitimate concern and many valid stakeholders make it like playing four-dimensional chess.
When something is complex, we commonly seek progress in one of two ways: 1) Break a complex problem down to its constituent parts, sequence these segments by relative importance or some other sorting mechanism, and then begin to work on each component one by one. Or, 2) Find a transcendent source that gives virtuous, value-based understanding to both the whole and the essential elements and then employ that lens to sort things out.
Actually, we could do number 2 as the basis for doing number 1.
Having no background in public policy, I am not capable of writing intelligently about all the factors driving the various global streams of human migration. But like many of us, I daily see the human pain that exists in the faces of people from all over the world: Pain that is fled from, and the challenges of resettlement in the countries fled to.
I would like to offer a perspective that might help global leaders in positions of power as well as average people just trying to make it through the day. The lens of love could help us see clearer and thereby make the challenging decisions necessary to care well for all humanity.
Love is a verb that points to a heart, soul, mind, emotional state, and set of desires that all line up in the human person and then are expressed in a symphony of seeking the good of others. This value shines brightly from core texts: God so loved his created world that he acted—he gave/sent—his only Son…to dwell among us (John 3:16; 1 John 4:9; John 1:14).
Love wills the good of others. Those who are seeking to align with God learn to love what God loves—the whole world. Whatever practical steps need to be taken to heal our world will be in harmony with God’s love.
We pray love will motivate the direct activity of members of local churches as we care for those in need. We pray that love will be the inspiration of policy-making efforts of all sorts in every country of the world. A loving, generous spirit humanizes rather than dehumanizes people because such a spirit expresses itself in seeking the good of all people.
I wrote the following song to work out the various ways that Love impacts our troubled world. I wondered what it would look like to view our world and the broken people of the world through the cross of Christ.
What would it look like to live in the world through this cross of Christ? May we glory in the color-full cross and love everyone made in the image of God by willing their good.
Immigration is not four dimensional chess. There are trained professionals that know the business of who comes in, who stays, and who is deported. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, Border Patrol, and asylum court system.
You need not worry about it from your leather recliner. The problem is that you and many others think you’re smarter and more compassionate than the trained professionals that sweat over this problem day and night. Immigration was not enforced for the last four years, just like you wanted it, and now we have 300,000 missing children, multiple rapes, murders, and fentanyl deaths. You’re not smarter than everyone else because you live on a college campus or in a liberal church parsonage. There are people risking their lives to clean up your mess. Give it a rest and let the compassionate “laborers” do the work that needs to be done. Pray for them. They are doing God’s work, not wringing their hands and writing songs.
Thanks so much!!!!
Much love!!