"Fair-Weather Friends"

"This is my commandment:  Love each other in the same way I have loved you.  There is no greater love than to lay down one's life for one's friends."  -John 15:12-13

I have to admit it, I am a sucker for a sappy love story.  Gone With the Wind is easily my all time favorite movie, and others on my list would include Casablanca, It's A Wonderful Life, Little Women, and Anne of Green Gables.

Weird list?  I suppose.
But they give me that warm fuzzy feeling that makes me come back to them over and over again.  Perhaps it is because they remind me of the people I used to watch them with, (siblings, family, close friends) but I also think it is because they are incredible love stories.

It is a quote from Anne of Green Gables in particular that I have come to cherish as my personal reminder of love.  I could almost quote this movie word-for-word from start to finish-as could my sisters and mother.  (Here I insert a large apology to my little brother.)

Anyway, in the movie, Anne is an orphan taken underwing by a brother and sister who never got married and had families of their own.  Anne doesn't know how to pray and as Marilla is teaching her about God and prayer, she says, "God does not want you for a fair-weather friend."

I never really thought about what that meant until years later, and then it hit me like a brick and stuck.  Loving God, loving family, and loving friends only when they are perfect, only when life is going your way, only if they never hurt you, and only when it is convenient isn't really love.  And it isn't what Christ wants for us.

Love comes in so many different forms...sometimes it is fast and overwhelming, sometimes it kind of sneaks up on us, no matter how we find it...there is power where there is love.  And if you can truly show unconditional love in this world to all the people around you (spouses, children, family, close friends, acquaintances, even enemies) it has the ability to change the world...and also to change you.

In Anne of Green Gables, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert set out to change Anne's life for the better and in the end it was their hearts and lives that were blessed.

A few years ago, I made the decision to love like this...like Christ.  It isn't easy, it doesn't always come naturally, and it isn't without effort.  In fact sometimes it takes a conscious choice to tell myself to love them anyway...but its result has overflowed my life and awakened my soul.  See the thing is, God doesn't want us to love him only when life is going according to our plans....not just as a fair-weather friend.  He wants a love that is deeper.  And he wants us to love people the same way.

To love another with complete abandonment, without counting wrongs, without counting faults, is the most freeing, most powerful feeling you could ever have.  And the truth is, you are loved like that.  It's in the greatest love story that ever existed.  A love story in which a man gave his life so that YOU might live.

So make the choice.  Choose to love.