Love in Disagreement

Many moons ago, when Adam and I were dating...before the excitement of our wedding and the joy and exhaustion of five children...we did super exciting things. Namely biking, fishing and hiking.

We were so daring.

The summer before my senior year of college, we decided to go to a large music festival in Pennsylvania. It is often described as Woodstock without the drugs and nudity, and with a whole lot of Jesus. It's a pretty accurate description, and a whole lot of fun. Music is blaring almost all the time from at least one of the many stages, and you're surrounded by people on blankets and in tents. It's friendly to ages zero to "however old you can be and still sleep on the ground."

We packed up Adam's new tent and some sleeping bags and left the fields of Ohio for the fields of Pennsylvania. His parents weren't thrilled about us going. Not because they didn't want us there...but because it was just US there. No parents, no other friends coming along. Just a boy and a girl. In a tent. Do the math.

I totally shrugged it off -something I had gotten really adept at doing during my college years. Seem like what you're doing might be a bad idea? Whatever. I got this covered. Do you think maybe you'll be sending the wrong message to the people around you? Free your mind, people. We're in love and we're planning on getting married sooner than later, so blah. Just let it go. Two decades of life under my belt and I was an expert. Ex-pert.

We arrived in the wonderful chaos and picked a place to pitch our tent. I don't fully remember if the spots around us were empty at the time, or if we were squeezing in between established residents, but by the time we got back from wandering and listening that first day, there wasn't an empty patch of grass anywhere on those 285 acres.

a city of thousands of tents...and blue porta-johns

Our neighbor for those few days was a family from the east coast. Two kids, probably both under 8 years old. We said some polite hellos that first evening. They were very friendly and sweet...asking lots of questions with genuine interest. I remember, as we were talking, watching their kids run circles around the tent. I got that terrible stomach wrenching feeling like maybe I wasn't an expert after all. But I shrugged it off.

Back we went to the hubbub of excitement. I have to be honest, there's nothing like really loud music about God to help you ignore what God is trying to tell you at the moment. *wink*

In spite of the guilt I was carrying, I know that the weekend was still full of worship and moments of wonderful communion with God. But honestly, most of it was clouded by the fact that -though I wasn't going to admit it with my lips- we were doing something we shouldn't.

Were we doing terrible naughty things in the tent? No. Were we flaunting our unmarried status? Of course not. We were there, doing our best to learn from the guest speakers and worship God with thousands of other people.

But four of these people, in particular, taught me the most about God that weekend.
The final morning, we awoke to the sounds of the neighbor family up and about. We unzipped the tent to find the dad crouched over the fire with a metal coffee pot in his hands. A smile broke across his face, and he waved us over.

"You guys need to see this."
(Rubbing our eyes and yawning. How are these people up so early, and yet so happy?)
"I'm gonna make coffee over the campfire with a dress sock."
(Adam is immediately drawn in.)
"Don't worry. It's a new sock." *wink*

And there it was. We all sat there around the fire and enjoyed great company and some surprisingly delicious joe. Us -two kids escaping for the weekend, striving to meet God somewhere, but falling miserably short. Them - a family of four, choosing to love on these two people they had just met as if there was no falling short, and no cause for judgement. Just love.

Now that I am a parent, this story is so much sweeter to me. My mother bear instincts over my children are pretty fierce. I internally loathe park goers that can't keep their language clean around the playground. I fume when the conversation of college age boys in the grocery turns to objectification of women, even as they pass a cart full of children. The desire to shelter and protect my own children is intense. Looking back, I know those parents had an important choice to make:

Do we smile and nod and avoid interaction so that we don't have to explain the situation to our children when they eventually ask? Or do we go ahead and really love on them, in spite of the behavior we see in them that we feel is wrong?

I am so very glad that they chose love. 

It's almost always the more difficult road to take. It's rarely comfortable. Your hands will get dirty. Your lives will be more complicated. You'll have to explain things to your kids that you didn't want to tell them until they were much older. Each interaction will challenge you to look more closely at the person in front of you...to understand who they really are, instead of making assumptions and throwing stones. It is certainly the road less traveled.

But this road. It is the only road worth taking. 

---

If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love I'm nothing but the creaking of 

a rusty gate. If I speak God's word with power, revealing all of His mysteries and making everything as plain as day, and if I have faith to say to a mountain jump and it jumps but I don't love I'm nothing. If I give all I earn to the poor or even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, no matter what I believe, no matter what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.

{1 Corinthians 13 -The Message}