By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:35
Stunned…
Crushed…
There were no other words…
The once happy baby toys lay abandoned…
Silent.
Their two-and-a-half month old granddaughter had died…
Grieving themselves…
Grieving with a sorrow beyond anything they had ever known…
They searched for the strength to comfort their daughter in her own grief.
Where could they turn?
Hesitantly, they mentioned the baby’s death to someone at church.
“Hesitantly” because they weren’t long-time attenders at church.
They didn’t have church friendships that stretched back years or decades…
They expected little more than a kind word, perhaps a promise of prayer.
The church gave both of those and more…
Their daughter didn’t attend the church, but church members sought her out, providing her and her parents with comfort, counseling and help with physical needs…
Church members were following Jesus’s command…
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. John 13:34
Putting aside their own needs and wants to meet the needs of another…
“… Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” John 15:13
“They surrounded us with love,” said the grandfather.
He was telling the story years later at a party for volunteers at the church.
“I didn’t go to church regularly back then,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what I believed. But when I saw all that love, it changed my life.”
He had seen the church putting Christ’s love into action…
Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth. 1 John 3:18
He had seen church members becoming the hands and feet of Christ…
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body….
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.“Christ Has No Body”
St Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)
