Love With Its Sleeves Rolled Up

Once, a man named James sat down to write a letter to people he loved, who were tired and frightened and trying to follow God.

And in his letter, James asked them a question. A little tricky one. Lean in close, because he is asking you too.

Imagine, he said, that someone you know is cold. Their coat is thin. Their tummy is empty and growling. And you look at them and you say, in a warm and friendly voice, "Goodbye! Stay nice and toasty! I hope you find a good supper!"

And then you walk away.

You didn't give them a coat. You didn't give them bread. All you gave them were words, and words alone will not keep anybody warm.

Do you feel how those words land softly and then drift off, like a leaf, pretty and useless?

That is what James wanted his friends to feel. Because nice words are easy. They cost you nothing. But real help is harder. Real help means you have to stop what you are doing. You have to do something with your hands.

James said you can SAY you love God all day long. You can say it the way you'd say "I'm hungry" or "it's raining." But love that only ever sits in your mouth, and never gets up off the chair, is a strange sort of love.

Real love rolls up its sleeves.

Real love makes the soup. Carries the coat across the cold street. Kneels down beside the one who is crying. Real love has bread crumbs on its fingers and mud on its knees.

James wasn't trying to scold his friends. He was trying to show them something he had watched with his own eyes, all through his growing-up years. Because the one James grew up beside, in the same little house, was Jesus.

And Jesus went around the dusty roads doing exactly this. When people were hungry, he didn't wave and wish them well. He broke real bread and filled real hands. When the sick came to him, ashamed and shaking, he didn't call out kind words from far away. He reached out. He touched them. He let his love get all the way down to where the hurt was.

That is what God's heart is like. He is not a God of pretty words drifting off like leaves. He is a God who came down, who got dust on his feet for you, who opened his hands wide to give, and give, and give.

The world thinks the big people are the ones who get served. But Jesus turned that the other way around. In his family, the great ones are the ones kneeling with the soup.

So when you carry a coat to someone cold, you are not earning anything. You are joining in. You are doing the very thing your brother Jesus loves to do.

And that family, full of hands just like his, is spreading all over the world right now. It began the day Jesus knelt down with the bread. One day it will be finished, every cold one warmed, every empty hand filled.

Until then, there is a kitchen somewhere with your name on the door, and a pot of soup that needs carrying, and a brother who is already at the stove with his sleeves pushed up past his elbows, waiting to see you walk in.