Loving the imperfect

I love being home. I love my home. I love the people who live in it, who visit it, who roam around it.

I am a homebody. You wouldn’t know it since we’re always whizzing here or there, but when I’m home… I love it. There are weekends I crave to be home. So I do. I stay. I love putzing around it… cleaning it, organizing it, painting it, dreaming about it.

I’d have to say, my home and I… we have quite the love affair.

Is it perfect? Nope.

I can list out the dozens of things I’d like fixed… but I love it and accept it just as it is, because it’s ours. It is our tremendously awesome blessing from the Lord.

Boy do I wish I could do the same with people.

Just love them regardless of their sin because they are “mine”, a blessing from the Lord in my life.
It takes work, doesn’t it?

With family, it’s different. We’re all a bunch of crazies living together wading through life together. But with others… yowzers.
God put so many different people in my life and that makes them all “mine”. They are my people because they are His people.
So why is it so hard to look past those imperfections at times? Especially when those imperfections are the things that God wants you to love them through?

God doesn’t ask us to love our situation when it’s perfect. He doesn’t ask us to love people when they are perfect. He asks us to love them now. Just the way they are. All messed up and broken.

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. – John 13:34

Cause that’s how He loves me and my imperfect self.