[the God dare]

"Always seek to love others with the relentless, unconditional, beautiful, powerful, amazing love that God loves you with. At first you'll fall flat on your face and find that your heart is full of hatred and can only cough out an occasional, weak, sickly, reluctant love. But know that this is a necessary first step: until you realize just how deplorable your love is, you'll never get far in the journey towards God's type of love. So be persistent. When you fall on your face, ask your Father for forgiveness and new strength... and get. On. Your. Feet."

This was written by my friend, Samuel Hayashida, and it is well worth reading all the way through. I don't always agree with everything he writes.. in fact, most of the time I don't agree with everything. But I really appreciate the way that he thinks, deeply and out of the box. Here's his facebook page. Hop over there and like it.

"Life is a dare.

That sacred moment when God first breathed life into Adam's lungs, He breathed an eternal dare onto humanity. Every time a newborn breathes his first breath in this world, he enters into that dare. Every time you take a new breath, whether asleep or awake, working or resting, ten years old or ninety years old... you're breathing in God's dare, renewing it. See, life isn't just a collection of events; it's not a list of "have-to"s or "should"s. Life is God's gift, God's way of daring us to make some beauty. And this isn't figurative speech. This isn't something I just made up for the sake of a cool-sounding note. This isn't "metaphorical."  

Resulting from all the noise, busyness, and agitation in our lives as 21st century citizens, we've lost touch with this quiet call hidden inside every one of us. We're distracted; we no longer notice it. But underneath all the mindless commotion, every breath of every man renews God's whispered dare. It's just as present now as it was when it was first breathed into us. It's when we learn how to integrate our lives with silence and stillness, it's then that we begin to come alive once more to this whisper. So I guess the point of this note is to ask you to listen. Quiet down. Still your thoughts, silence your questions... if possible, get away from other people, sounds, and the craziness of life... and listen:

I dare you to love.

I dare you to love extravagantly. I dare you to stop confining love within words and definitions and to see how far you can take it in practice. To seek a standard with no limits. To find a way around anything that threatens to stop the onward movement of your love, anything that threatens to slow it down. To reach further than they say is possible. To love harder than they say is necessary. To find love for those who hate, for those who hurt, for those who betray.

I dare you to love when the music stops. When there's nothing romantic or admirable or thrilling about it. When there's nobody watching. I dare you to do that. When there's no glory, no praise, no reason, no soul deserving of it. When you no longer want to, when everything in you says you can't. When there's no one to cheer you on, no one to hear about it, no one to know about it. When even your good friends think it's unnecessary, silly, or exaggerated. When you're the only one left. I dare you to keep loving where others stop. To keep loving where others draw the line. To keep loving where your friends start backing out, getting angry, hating. I dare you to love when you don't have to.

I dare you to love people with your mouth. To stop discussing people, analyzing them. To stop picking them apart and talking about what you don't like about them, what annoys you about them, what bothers you. To stop criticizing. To stop joking about people. To stop laughing at them. I dare you to treat every person you meet like he was made in the image of God.

I dare you to stop joking about people being fat. Socially awkward. Unattractive. Know that your words sink deeper and bite harder than you will ever know. Even when the people you joke about go unnamed. Even when your words never reach the ears of those they were aimed at. Even when you weren't entirely serious. So I dare you to love those people with your mouths. To stop labeling them. To stop treating them like a joke, to stop discussing them, to stop locking them with your words in the icy cell of insecurity and self-hatred. I dare you to stand up for society's rejects. I dare you to provide them with a place where they finally fit in, belong, and are utterly accepted and loved for who they are.

I dare you to treat your disliking of a person as if it were cold hatred. I dare you to treat your annoyance with someone as if you were committing an unforgivable crime. To see and dwell only upon the good in a person, to associate with people's flaws. To abandon thinking, talking, and dealing with people's flaws to God alone. To relentlessly seek to forgive, even when the wounds are deep, even when it takes years to do it.

I dare you to seek peace with all men with all your might. To strain never to hold something against anyone. To never avoid a person but always to remain ready and open to talking with them. To never back down, never be "done with" a person, but to always be willing to forgive a repentant heart, even when the repentance is half-hearted or fake. I dare you to apologize. To own up to your mistakes. To accept the consequences. I dare you to let people hate you, to let people laugh at you, to let people misunderstand you. To let people hold your sins against you, to let them dwell on and exaggerate your screw-ups and flaws, to let them talk about you behind your back. I dare you love those people. To try with all your might to treat them kindly. To not seek revenge by bringing their sins to the attention of your friends. I dare you to keep their sins a secret. To hide them from your friends' gaze. To love them that much. To pray compassionately for them, to see that the reason they hate is because they've been hated, to humbly ask God that He would forgive them their sins against you and forgive you your sins against them.

I dare you to love people with all. Your. Mind. To start closing your mind to malicious, hurtful, or judgmental thoughts. To shun thoughts about how silly someone looks, how stupid someone is being, how arrogant someone is acting. I dare you to not even think about a person's flaws. I dare you to start regulating what goes into your mind. I dare you to start treating others how you yourself wish others would treat you. To stop picking people apart in your head, to stop forming secret opinions about others, to stop assuming that you're on the good side and your enemy is on the bad side. Know that God loves both of you, knows the flaws in both of you, and sees the good in both of you, and He's no more "for you" than He is "for" your enemy. God doesn't take sides, neither should you. I dare you to start stepping into your Father's perspective.

I dare you to love strangers. To love the people you'll never see again in your life. To treat even these as the beloved of God. I dare you to hold your biting tongue when you start to poke fun at a ridiculous-looking jogger, when you come across an angry driver, when the cashier at the checkout is having a bad day. I dare you to start treating all men with compassion.

Friend. I dare you to love. Love as hard as you can, and when you're at the end of your rope, step out onto God's. Make your love shine brighter than the sun. Love without limit. Love more than is necessary. Never stop. Never be satisfied with the state of your love; always seek to increase it. Always seek to love others with the relentless, unconditional, beautiful, powerful, amazing love that God loves you with. At first you'll fall flat on your face and find that your heart is full of hatred and can only cough out an occasional, weak, sickly, reluctant love. But know that this is a necessary first step: until you realize just how deplorable your love is, you'll never get far in the journey towards God's type of love. So be persistent. When you fall on your face, ask your Father for forgiveness and new strength... and get. On. Your. Feet. Keep your love moving, growing, increasing, conquering. If you till the ground, plant, water, weed, prune, protect, sweat, work, weep, and cry out... God will provide the increase. So stop waiting. Start the journey now.

Never let your thoughts about someone settle in a negative light. That's key. Let God who alone knows all things do the analyzing, searching, and judging. Stop holding secret opinions about people; if you had your way, you wouldn't want people picking you apart in their mind and secretly thinking of you as "annoying" or "naive" or "immature" or "awkward." So start a new work today. Begin loving others as hard as you wish they loved you. Dedicate your life to that. Seek it. Always.

Like I said, I'm not making up this whole dare thing. This isn't poetry. This isn't "nice sounding fluff," it's not motivational hype. I've just sat still, kept silent, and shut up long enough to begin hearing the sound all around me. It's there—in the silence of night, in the warmth of the wind, in my own every breath. I can guarantee you, if you do the same, you'll find the same. It's a secret, but a secret that was meant to be accessed by every man alive. Go slow your schedule down, make as much time for God as you can, bring Him into every odd moment, seek Him away from distractions, start trying to do everything His way... and you too will begin to see this dare hidden deep inside every cross. With every new day this particular whispered word from God will become clearer and clearer:

I. Dare. You. To. Love."