When you learn about how to do an appraisal, one of the first things they teach you about is highest and best use. For instance, the used to be a cast iron bathtub, finished in porcelain with elegant clawed feet that is now a planter in your yard or maybe a bird bath in the yard of the redneck next door, isn't worth much in its current state but if you restore it back to its highest and best use...well, now you've got something. This is how the love of God works. It doesn't just see the broken down thing you are; it sees the perfectly created thing He made you to be. It sees your highest and best use.
Speaking with someone Tuesday night and I exclaimed, I am NOT cheerleader! I have never liked cheerleaders or seen the use of them during a game. In fact, I find them distracting from the action. Sit down little, perky girl and let me see the play as it happens...quit blocking my view! Ironically, this is just how God has decided to use me: cheerleader. He has gifted me the spiritual gift of exhortation (Romans 12:6-8). Ironic but isn't that just like Him. He hasn't changed my mind with regards to cheerleaders on the football field, but I do see the highest and best use of my gift: distraction. When I allow God to use me to exhort someone, He uses me to distract them from their current circumstance just long enough, He can turn their head and eyes back to Him.
So, what does it mean to exhort? When we look at the word in Latin (exhortari) it literally means to thoroughly encourage but Webster’s definition is a bit more elaborate… to incite by argument or advice : urge strongly : to give warnings or advice : make urgent appeals. Incite means to encourage or stir up, urge or persuade. It might just be me but when I read all of that, at first it feels a bit intense. It feels like a calling to help carry a burden, keep someone headed the right direction, warn them when they are in danger or maybe even asking them to do something they are afraid of while offering to hold their hand through it. It is a calling to be a true friend (Proverbs 18:24).
As I have begun to understand my spiritual gifts, I find they work in tandem with one another. I have the gift of healing although it is the emotional / spiritual kind not the physical and I have the gift of wisdom. I also have the gift of giving which was bestowed upon by my parents. But, the only gift I have outright asked God for is love. I pray almost everyday that He gives me His eyes when I look upon someone. I don’t want to see my eyes see or only what is on the outside. I want to see who He created them to be. I want to see the brokenness and understand it because with understanding comes empathy and compassion. I Corinthians 13:13 tells us the greatest of gift is love. Verse 8 of the same chapter states love will never be obsolete. I John 4:18 tells us there is no fear in love and that perfect love drives out fear. Loving someone properly, the way God does, will always leave that person in a better place than you found them.
I tell everyone I know to read Love Does by Bob Goff. It is such a great book! It shows you how to put love into action. Because in the immortal words of John Mayer: “Love is a verb. It ain’t a thing. It’s not something you. It’s not something you scream. When you show me love, I don’t need your words. Yeah, love ain’t a thing.” BUT it was the forward of the book, written by Donald Miller that sent me down the path to asking God for the gift of love. He wrote about Bob, “I don’t know how to explain Bob’s love except to say it is utterly and delightfully devastating. You simply cannot live the same once you know him.” How beautiful is that! I want to love people like that! So, I asked Him, right then and there to give me the gift of love and as it goes with most things you ask God for like say, patience…you don’t really know what you’re asking Him for until He starts to give it to you.
Loving, the way He loves means you will be hurt. It means you need to understand vulnerability is a strength not a weakness. It means you will have both great joy and great heartache, but it also means He will grow the ability in you to see people like you never have before. You will see their highest and best use and you will not be able to help yourself fighting for it. You will give up your time, your energy, your heart but each time you give something up, you gain more of Him and instead of getting weaker, you get fortified.
I loved a man once that did not love me back and I asked God why. He told me very clearly in ALL relationships, including Him, He from time to time brings us to a place where we must make a choice: you or me. When it came to this man, each time God brought us to that place, I chose him, and he chose himself. Hence, we were both in love with him. At first that hurt me, why did he never choose me and yet tell me he loved me but as time wore on, I came to understand that he couldn’t chose me. His life was not in a place where he could ever put me first. He had other, more important people, mainly God and his children that had to be his priority. The ability to see him through God’s eyes gave me proper perspective and allowed me not to just continue to love him but to love him better.
I still have a long way to go…it is easier to love people right from the start of a relationship than it is to go back and try to love them right out of an old one, if that makes any sense. Relationships have a life and rhythm of their own and the old ones might have some broken chords and off tune choruses that need to be fixed and rewritten to find harmony. That takes time, but God has shown me if I don’t allow the fear of the old keep me from the new, He will fix the old in His time and His time is perfect.
So, I encourage you now to ask God to impart to you the gift of love and expand your understanding of how it works because just like Zac Brown sings, “love is the remedy”.
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