Chapter 8

As we come to the final chapter of this series, I find myself reflecting on the journey we have taken together.

We began by exploring prophetic imagination - the invitation to see beyond what is and imagine what could be. We considered how love and fear quietly shape all of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. We explored anxiety, scapegoating, and the ways we often create outsiders in an effort to manage our own discomfort. We examined the images of God we carry and encountered the cruciform God revealed in Jesus. We re-imagined the gospel as God’s dream of shalom: peace, goodness, and wholeness between each of us and God, ourselves, all others, and the Earth. We rediscovered our original goodness and belovedness. And most recently, we reflected on our profound interconnectedness and the reality that we belong to one another.

In many ways, this journey has been an exercise in learning to see. Seeing ourselves differently. Seeing God differently. Seeing one another differently. Seeing the world differently.

Yet there is a difference between seeing and living.

Many people know what love is. Many believe in love. Many admire love. Yet embodying love can be so much more difficult.

Knowledge alone does not transform us. We can agree with every idea in this series and still struggle with fear. We can understand scapegoating and still find ourselves blaming others. We can believe in our belovedness and still listen to the voices of shame. We can affirm our connectedness and still act as though we are separate from one another.

That is not failure. It is simply part of being human.

Before we go any further, I think it is important to remind us of something that I first mentioned all the way back in the introduction. And that is, I am not presenting anything in this series as “the only way” to understand these topics. This is not about certainty. I am not about certainty. At best, it is simply one way to understand – a perspective that I have found helpful at this point in my journey. I am certainly not writing as someone who has arrived. I am still learning, growing, healing, and changing. I continue to work through my own wounds and issues. I still attend therapy and recovery groups. I still struggle. There are many days when I forget what I have written in these pages. Just ask my wife!

Like you, I am simply trying to take one more step each day toward healing, wholeness, and the restoration of shalom. That is all any of us can do.

This chapter, then, is not about achieving perfection. It is not about becoming better religious people, more successful people, or even more knowledgeable people. It is about practice. It is about learning how to participate in the reality we have been exploring throughout this series.

For if God’s dream is the restoration of all things, if we are beloved, if we belong to one another, and if love truly is at the center of reality, then the question naturally becomes, “How shall we live?”

Or perhaps more directly: How do we become people through whom love increasingly flows?

In the pages that follow, we will explore three responses to that question:

First, we will explore what it means to receive love ourselves and to live more deeply into our identity as people beloved by God.

Second, we will consider what it looks like to practice love together by creating communities shaped more by compassion than fear.

Finally, we will explore the widening circle of love that draws us beyond our comfort zones and into kinship with those we consider outsiders.

Because love is not merely something we believe, it is something we are. The invitation of the spiritual journey is not to become someone else, but to awaken to who we have been all along and to allow that reality to shape how we live in the world.

If the last chapter invited us to see that we are all one, then this chapter asks the obvious next question: If this is true, then how shall we live?

BECOMING LOVE WITHIN

Before we can become the love we are in the world, we must first learn to receive love ourselves.

For many of us, this may be the hardest part of the journey.

We often find it easier to extend compassion to others than to ourselves. We readily recognize the goodness, beauty, and worth of people we care about, yet struggle to believe those same things are true of us. Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to define ourselves by our failures, fears, mistakes, or the messages others have spoken over us.

But what if those things are not the deepest truth about us?

Throughout this series, we have explored the idea that humanity was created “very good,” that we bear the image of God, and that beneath all our wounds and struggles lies an original belovedness that has never been lost. If this is true, then the spiritual journey is not about becoming worthy of love or earning God’s acceptance. It is about awakening to what has been true all along.

In this sense, becoming love is not becoming someone else. It is becoming who we truly are. It is living into the goodness, belovedness, and connectedness that have always been present, even when hidden beneath layers of fear, shame, trauma, disappointment, or false stories about ourselves.

This is why I prefer the language of woundedness over brokenness. Broken things are often viewed as problems to be fixed or discarded. Wounds, however, invite healing. They acknowledge that harm has occurred while also holding open the possibility of restoration. To be wounded is not to be defective. It is simply to be human.

Every one of us carries wounds of some kind. Some come from childhood. Some come from relationships. Some come from past trauma, exclusion, failure, abuse, or shame. Some come from religious experiences that taught us to fear ourselves rather than love ourselves. These wounds are real and should never be minimized. Yet neither should they be mistaken for our identity. We are more than what happened to us.

Because love desires our flourishing, becoming love within involves intentionally tending to these wounds. For some, this may include therapy, counseling, recovery groups, support groups, spiritual direction, or other forms of healing work. Seeking help is one of the most courageous acts of both self-love and other-love a person can undertake.

Healing also requires learning to recognize shame when it appears. Shame tells us that our wounds are who we are. It insists that we are fundamentally flawed, unworthy, or unlovable. Shame narrows our lives and keeps us hidden from ourselves, from others, and from God. Love tells a different story. Love acknowledges our mistakes and imperfections, while refusing to reduce us to them. Love speaks truthfully about our lives, but always through the lens of compassion.

Part of becoming love within is learning to distinguish between these voices. Many of us carry a relentless inner critic that speaks with accusation, condemnation, and contempt. Over time, we may even mistake this voice for the voice of God. Yet when we look at the life of Jesus, we encounter a God who is compassionate, patient, merciful, and deeply committed to human flourishing. The voice of love may challenge us, but it does not humiliate us. It invites growth without withdrawing belonging.

Learning to hear that voice takes practice. Spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, silence, gratitude, journaling, contemplative reading, and participation in supportive communities can help us become more attentive to God’s presence and more aware of the stories we tell ourselves. These practices do not make God love us more and are not intended to be a measure of our spirituality, maturity, or worth. Rather, they help us become more aware of the love that has been present all along.

Rest is part of this work as well. In a culture that often measures worth through productivity and achievement, choosing to rest can become a deeply spiritual and subversive act. Rest reminds us that our value does not come from what we produce. We are loved before we accomplish anything, and apart from anything we accomplish.

Healthy boundaries are another expression of love. Boundaries are not walls that keep people out; they are practices that help us care for ourselves and others in healthy ways. They create space for honesty, respect, and mutual flourishing. Sometimes, becoming love requires learning to say yes. At other times, it requires learning to say no.

As we learn to receive compassion, we become more capable of extending compassion. As we experience grace, we become more capable of offering grace. As we heal, we become more available to participate in the healing of the world around us.

This is why becoming love within is not self-improvement.

It is not a project of fixing ourselves. It is a process of remembering. Remembering that we are beloved. Remembering that we bear the image of God. Remembering that we belong. And as we remember who we are, we become increasingly free to live from that truth and to share it with others.

Perhaps this is where becoming love begins: not by striving to become something new, but by awakening to the love that has been quietly calling our name from the very beginning.

We Are What We Contemplate

One final, but important thought: Part of becoming love within is learning to be intentional about what we allow to occupy our minds and hearts. Ancient spiritual teachers understood that we are shaped by what we contemplate, and modern neuroscience has only confirmed what they observed centuries ago. The stories we consume, the voices we listen to, the images we repeatedly view, and the conversations we continually engage in all help form our inner world. Over time, they influence what we believe about ourselves, others, and God.

This is especially important in an age when much of our media ecosystem is designed to capture and hold our attention. Fear, outrage, conflict, and anxiety keep us clicking, scrolling, and returning for more. While staying informed is important, living in a constant stream of alarm can gradually train our nervous systems to expect danger everywhere. It can reinforce the very fear, division, and scapegoating patterns we have explored throughout this series. If we’re not careful, we may find ourselves being formed more by outrage than by love.

Becoming love, then, may require us to occasionally step back and ask honest questions about what is shaping us. Does what I regularly consume leave me more compassionate or more fearful? More hopeful or more cynical? More connected to others or more suspicious of them? More aware of God’s presence or more trapped in anxiety? These questions are not about guilt or avoidance. They are simply invitations to notice whether the things filling our minds are helping us move toward shalom or away from it.

We are always being formed by something. The question is not whether we are being formed, but by what. Every day we are becoming a little more fearful or a little more loving, a little more cynical or a little more hopeful, a little more closed off or a little more open to others.

As much as possible, let us make room for voices, stories, relationships, practices, and experiences that cultivate beauty, wisdom, compassion, and hope. The goal is not ignorance of the world’s pain, but the formation of a heart that can engage that pain without being consumed by it. What we repeatedly give our attention to will shape who we become. If we hope to become people of love, then love must have a place to dwell in our minds and hearts.

BECOMING LOVE TOGETHER

Love was never meant to be a private experience. It is something we receive, something that transforms us, and ultimately something we practice together.

From the beginning, human beings have been created for connection. We are shaped by our relationships. We learn from one another, influence one another, and become more fully ourselves in community. If it is true that we become like the people and stories that surround us, then the communities we participate in matter deeply.

Throughout this series, we have explored the ways that love and fear shape our lives. The same is true of communities. Just as individuals can operate primarily from love or fear, communities can as well. Love-based communities and fear-based communities often produce very different outcomes.

Though it may all feel very normal from the inside, communities shaped primarily by fear tend to be closed, suspicious, and protective. This is especially true of faith communities. Their boundaries become more important than their relationships. New ideas may feel threatening. Questions may be viewed as problems to solve, rather than opportunities to learn. People outside the group can gradually become objects of concern, suspicion, or even fear (see Chapter Two). Over time, the community can become a closed system, with its teachers, books & media, other voices, and assumptions continually reinforcing one another. Anything outside the system may be viewed with caution because it feels unfamiliar and therefore potentially dangerous. In all unhealthy communities, but particularly communities of faith, this is often seen in a heavy curating of “outside” speakers, books & other media, and ideas.

This is understandable. Fear seeks safety. It seeks certainty. It seeks control. It can be frightening to the nervous system when those are absent. Yet communities organized around fear often discover that the safety they are pursuing comes with the cost of curiosity, growth, and genuine concern & connection with not only those outside the community, but even those within it.

Love creates something different, though.

Communities shaped by love make room for questions because they trust that truth does not need to be protected from honest inquiry. They value curiosity alongside conviction. They understand that growth often begins with uncertainty and that learning requires humility.

Love-based communities welcome outsiders because they remember that every insider was once on the outside, too. Rather than narrowing the circle of belonging, they continually seek to widen it. They recognize that every person bears the image of God and possesses inherent dignity and worth.

Love-based communities value people over ideology. They understand that beliefs matter, but people matter more. They refuse to reduce human beings to labels, categories, disagreements, or positions. Instead, they seek to honor both the person standing before them and the one outside their doors: the one with another religion, another political stance, another race, another culture, another lifestyle.

They prioritize transformation over conformity. Their goal is not to produce people who all think, act, speak, and vote the same way. Their goal is to nurture people who are becoming more loving, compassionate, wise, and whole. Uniformity may create order, but it is not the same thing as spiritual maturity.

Love-based communities also serve rather than dominate. Following the example of Jesus, they understand that leadership exists for the flourishing of others. Power is not accumulated for its own sake, but is continually given away in service, encouragement, healing, and care.

They practice truth-telling. Love is not sentimentality or avoidance. It is honest. It speaks truth with humility and receives truth with openness. It creates spaces where people can bring their questions, struggles, doubts, and failures without fear of rejection.

They refuse scapegoating. Because they understand the human tendency to relieve anxiety by blaming, labeling, and excluding others, they resist the temptation to create enemies. They refuse to build belonging by making someone else not belong. Instead, they seek understanding, reconciliation, and peace wherever possible.

And they practice forgiveness. Not because harm does not matter, but because resentment and retaliation ultimately deepen wounds rather than heal them. Forgiveness becomes one of the ways a community participates in God’s ongoing work of restoration.

This vision is not idealistic because communities shaped by love are perfect. They are not. Every single community is made up of imperfect people who often fail to live up to their highest values. The difference is that love-based communities know how to return. They know how to confess, repair, reconcile, and begin again.

All communities tend to drift toward either fear or love, but healthy communities learn how to continually return to love when they lose their way.

Perhaps this is what becoming love together looks like. It is creating communities where people can heal, grow, belong, and flourish. Communities that reflect God’s dream of goodness, peace, and wholeness. Communities that make it a little easier for each of us to remember who we are, whose we are, and what we are becoming together.

BECOMING LOVE AT THE EDGES

If becoming love within is learning to receive love and becoming love together is learning to practice in community, then becoming love at the edges is learning to expand that love beyond the familiar and comfortable places in our lives.

For many of us, the instinct is to think about helping others. We imagine ourselves bringing something to people who have less than we do. We picture ourselves serving, rescuing, teaching, or giving. While acts of compassion and generosity are important, Jesus seems to invite us into something even deeper.

Again and again, Jesus directs our attention toward people living at the margins of society: the foreigner, the poor, the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, the outcasts, and those whom society has learned to overlook or dismiss. Yet, those people are never presented merely as objects of charity. They are not projects to be fixed. They are people to be known, loved, and encountered.

In fact, Jesus suggests that they may have something to teach us.

This invitation from Jesus is not primarily to do something for people on the margins, but to be with them. Not as rescuers, but as fellow human beings. As learners. As friends. As family. As participants in kinship.

Father Greg Boyle, whom we introduced in previous chapters, often speaks of the importance of standing “with” rather than standing “over.” The goal is not to save others from a distance but to draw near enough that the illusion of separation begins to disappear. When we form genuine relationships with people whose lives differ from our own, something remarkable happens: both people are changed.

The relationship becomes mutual.

We discover gifts, wisdom, courage, resilience, and beauty where we expected only need. We learn that the people we imagined ourselves helping end up helping us in some way. We begin to see that every person carries inherent dignity, worth, and belovedness. We encounter original goodness.

This is why kinship is so different from charity. Charity can preserve distance, while kinship removes it. Charity says, “I have something you need.” Kinship says, “We belong to one another.”

Charity can reinforce the idea that some people are the helpers and others are the helped. Kinship reminds us that every person is both giver and receiver, teacher and student, wounded and healing.

This vision is deeply rooted in the life of Jesus. When we read the Gospels, it is most often those on the margins who are drawn to him. Foreigners, the poor, people with disabilities, tax collectors, prostitutes, and social outcasts continually gather around him. They eat together. Travel together. Learn together. Belong together.

Meanwhile, it is those most invested in maintaining status, power, and certainty who find Jesus threatening: church leaders, political leaders, and the like.

The pattern is difficult to miss.

From the very beginning, Jesus himself occupies a place of vulnerability. He is born to an ordinary family living under Roman occupation. He becomes a refugee-immigrant as a child. He spends most of his ministry among those considered outsiders. He has no money. He has no home of his own. He dies the death of an outcast beyond the city walls.

The story of Jesus consistently moves towards those who have been pushed aside and forgotten. This is seen in a very interesting way in Matthew 25, where Jesus says whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not simply say that he cares about the poor, the hungry, the sick, or the imprisoned. He identifies with them. And he identifies as them.

The implication is astonishing. Jesus is not merely with the least of these; somehow, mysteriously, he is encountered within them as well. To encounter the outsider is, in some profound sense, to encounter Christ.

This should change the way we see the world.

The marginalized are not only the economically poor. They may be immigrants, people of a different race or culture, people with disabilities, people of another religion, people who vote differently than we do, people whose lifestyles or experiences are unfamiliar to us, or anyone who has been pushed to the edges of belonging.

In every generation, societies create outsiders. We have explored throughout the series how anxiety often seeks relief through scapegoating, labeling, and exclusion. Communities create belonging by deciding who does not belong. Yet Jesus consistently moves in the opposite direction. Rather than narrowing the circle, he widens it.

The cruciform God revealed in Jesus always moves towards reconciliation rather than exclusion, toward compassion rather than condemnation, toward embrace rather than rejection.

This does not mean that every difference disappears or that healthy boundaries cease to matter. It means that we learn to see the image of God in every person, even those whom society teaches us to fear.

God’s dream has always been larger than our tribal boundaries. The restoration of shalom is not for a select few. It is for everyone.

The widening circle of love continually draws us beyond ourselves, beyond our assumptions, beyond our comfort zones, and beyond the limits of our compassion. And in doing so, it reveals a surprising truth: We do not merely bring love to the margins. We discover that love has been waiting for us there all along.

For learning to see Christ in the outsider, we begin to recognize Christ everywhere. And in doing so, we begin to understand what it truly means to belong to one another.

PRACTICING THE WAY OF LOVE

Throughout this series, we have explored prophetic imagination, love and fear, anxiety and scapegoating, the cruciform God, the restoration of shalom, original goodness, and our profound interconnectedness with one another. Yet the goal has never been simply to understand these ideas. The goal has always been to live them.

The invitation before us is not perfection, but practice. We will continue to make mistakes. We will continue to struggle with fear, anxiety, wounds, and old patterns. Yet each day offers another opportunity to return to love.

If you choose to participate in this exercise, first still yourself and ask God for understanding. Then, in your stillness, and being as honest, open, and specific as possible, consider the following questions while reflecting on this chapter and the journey we have taken together:

Reflection

Receive Love

Practice Love Together

Remember that healthy communities are built one relationship at a time.

Become Love At The Edges

The way of love is not a destination we arrive at once and for all. It is a path we walk every day. And each small step toward love is a step toward the life God has dreamed for us all along.

We began the series with an invitation to imagine that a more beautiful world is possible.

Along the way, we explored many of the forces that prevent us from living into that vision. We examined the ways fear shapes our lives, how anxiety seeks relief through scapegoating, how our images of God influence how we see ourselves and others, and how shame and separation can keep us from experiencing the fullness of life that God intends for us.

We also discovered something else. Again and again, we encountered a more beautiful alternative:

Love instead of fear.

Compassion instead of scapegoating.

The cruciform God as revealed in Jesus, instead of the gods of our own projection.

Shalom instead of fragmentation.

Belovedness instead of shame.

Connectedness instead of separation.

Kinship instead of exclusion.

Looking back, we can see that these have not been separate topics. They have all been different facets of the same invitation: to see ourselves, one another, and the world through the eyes of love.

The invitation to participate in God’s dream of goodness, peace, and wholeness between each of us and God, each of us and ourselves, each of us and all others, and each of us and the Earth.

The invitation to become love.

Not perfectly. Not all at once. Not through grand gestures or dramatic achievements. But through the ordinary, daily practice of choosing love over fear, compassion over judgment, belonging over exclusion, and hope over despair.

The world is changed this way. One person at a time. One relationship at a time. One act of courage, kindness, forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation at a time.

God’s dream has always required participants. Not people who have all the answers. Not people who have arrived. Not people who are free from wounds, doubts, or struggles. Simply, people who are willing to take the next step. People who are learning to receive love, practice love, and widen the circle of love. People who are learning, little by little, to become what they have been all along.

As this series comes to a close, my hope is not that you remember every idea that has been shared. My hope is that you leave with a deeper awareness of your belovedness, a greater compassion for others, and a renewed commitment to participate in God’s ongoing work of restoration and healing in the world.

The world needs more people who are becoming love.

BLESSING

And so, as we continue our journey toward the realization of God’s dream of peace, goodness, and wholeness between each of us and God, each of us and ourselves, each of us and all others, and each of us and the earth, may we remember first and foremost that we are the Beloved of God.

May we have the courage to receive this love that has always been there for us, to extend that love to those around us, and in doing so, to widen the circle of our compassion until no one stands outside of it.

For the invitation has never been merely to believe in love. The invitation has always been to live into the love we are.

Amen