snapshots of love

Tonight our bcm discipleship team had it's first kickoff event for the year. We faced an awful lot of obstacles and used a lot of flexibility but overall pulled off a really successful event. The finale of it, a women's ministry "movie under the stars" ended up being a movie in the chapel but was still a lot of fun. It was a good thing we moved in because right towards the end of the movie, the heavens opened up and a monsoon began. Regardless, everything happened beautifully. ...Until everyone left.

Heidi and I were carrying the sound board back downstairs when we turned to see that the downstairs of our beloved uga bcm had all of a sudden become an indoor swimming pool. Seriously, there was a least and inch and a half of water rushing across the floor towards the stage (and the closet full of quite pricey sound equipment...)

I yelled frantically for Karen and the next hour was spent with the three of us plus Courtney literally sweeping and shoving water out the back door of the bcm. Of course the shop vac didn't work and it was beginning to seem like a futile effort. We called in Franklin and by God's grace Aubrey and Scott Murphy showed up and ended up helping. It took us forever to push the water out but luckily nothing was damaged... but it was the point around midnight when I was barefoot, dirty, soaked, and on my hands and knees wiping the nasty floor with towels that it hit me...

this is love.

It's our theme for the year... love. But what is love? Tonight, we saw love manifested in service. What in the world would persuade a bunch of college kids on a Friday night to be frantically trying to mop water out a door? What would drive us to stay there any longer after having literally been in the building 10 hours already? We pulled together quickly to fix the problem because we love our bcm.

But why? Why love an old, dirty building? Why put such effort into working there and devote so much time and passion to an organization led by a bunch of college students? We give and serve and do what we do not because we are bored or have tons of free time, but so that we can effectively love our students because Christ first loved us. We talked this Tuesday about how God loves us because He loves us because He loves us. He just does. And therefore we should just do also. And that love manifests itself in so many ways-- be it shuttling around freshman, stepping up to grill hamburgers last minute, giving up your free time to run sound, giving up sleep to play rec games all night after a long week of class, cleaning up a kitchen, playing frisbee with others, stacking chairs when it's not even your job, or sweeping water out the door at midnight... The beauty of that thought is that all of those are specific things that I have seen lived out by different people just today.

I'm overwhelmed by the magnitude of such giving love... we do our best to love efficiently as an outflowing of our hearts first because Christ loves us and second because he asked us to go forth and selflessly love others. And I love daily watching that play out. I think this is going to be a really cool year for us, not just as a ministry but also as individuals. When we open our hearts to love, it is amazing what the Lord will show us, even when we don't expect it.