Loving

Parched ground.

Listen, listen, love, love. I’ll always be grateful to the Christian ministry that shaped its prison ministry around those four words. One can be technical and say it’s only two words. However, listening and loving are not into technical.  

The word “love” has different meanings in different contexts. For those of us when we minister in prison, and oh I wish everywhere, the love we practice is the one set forth by Paul:

4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. I Corinthians 13:4-8

Prison culture from the top down does not generally take kindly to the love Paul describes. Maybe that is one of the reasons that Godly love has such a profound impact on everyone present. Loved with Godly love, we respond like parched ground when water is poured on it.