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Love A Little Harder
by Captain
Christine Tursi
Do you by any chance have a surplus of
love? No? No spare love in a pocket? No spare love in a box
under your bed or between the pages of a book gathering dust
in your library?
Apparently we only have room for 5
people in our life. 5 people to love, 5 people to care for, 5
people to think of, 5 people to worry about, 5 people whose
fears you know, 5 people whose dreams you protect, 5 people
you’d go to war for. 5.
I have my 5. I have held them close for
the past 30+ years, 3 of them have held me close for the past
36. I don’t have room, place, time, energy, spare love for
more.
And still, I’m called to love more
people, I’m led to more people to love, my heart explodes with
love for people pretty much as soon as I meet them. This isn’t
my making, I was loved first by a God who’s made of and
creates endless amounts of love. A heart filled with God’s
love can only expand and make room for more people to love.
Tonight My team and I will head into
brothels with tiny cupcakes and gigantic amounts of love (I
started this blog this morning, we are now back from the RLD),
tomorrow my building will be filled mostly by men looking for
food but hungry for more and we’ll cover them with love, in
the evening I will visit families made of wounded people and I
hope love can be a soothing balm.
I have my 5 people, I have my friends,
I have the people I was sent to; I might have a smile for a
stranger on the street…Honestly, I don’t think I have spare
love to hand out. And still, there are more people to love…
Today is the European Anti-Human
Trafficking day, and as war rages on, poverty increases, the
redlight districts fill with increasingly more people (and
those are only the ones we see) and people are exploited all
around Europe and the world
I wonder…
I wonder how can I love the potential
victims, the people in situations of trafficking and
exploitation, the people who managed to escape, survive, find
a spot back into society. Do we have spare love for them?
How can I love someone I never met? How
can I love even more people than the ones already filling my
heart and my thoughts? How can I love someone society does not
see? How can I love people in buildings I’d never enter, on
building sites I’m not allowed on, in factories where the
products I buy leave people with bleeding fingers whilst the
world screams MORE and CHEAPER?
I can love them by bringing them to God
in prayer again and again, not because he doesn’t know but
because often it’s the only thing we can do. So we entrust
them into God’s hands. He is at work. And our prayers are part
of it. Prayers are love letters sent to God, because we don’t
have the address of the recipient.
I can love them by volunteering at a
place taking care of vulnerable people. Showing them love by
serving them a cup of tea, showing them love by helping them
with homework, showing them love by sorting out clothes for
them - did you know that lonely people are more likely to fall
into traps? Did you know that hopeless people trust blindly
whoever even only hints at a solution to their problems? Did
you know that you can remind someone that contracts are
important, that one should never hand over a passport, that
boys don’t always love but instead often use love to trap you?
Getting to know vulnerable people, journeying with them,
supporting them, showering them with love, that’s part of
prevention. Those smiles, those gestures, those acts of
service, those hours are love letters that can change
someone’s life.
I can love them by getting informed and
spreading information about trafficking and exploitation. It
doesn’t take long. We often cannot enter places of
exploitation, we can’t save people from being trafficked/who
are being exploited but we can do our best to change the
society we live in, by building God’s kingdom on earth.
Participating in this is a love letter to the world.
I just got home from the redlight
district. My jumper smells of smoke, my head is filled with
faces (scared faces, yelling faces, nervous faces, smiling
faces, empty faces…), I have prayed, hugged, laughed,
listened, invited, smiled, worried,…
I have loved with all my heart.
And still I have more to give.
On this European Anti-Trafficking day
let’s choose to love a little harder. It’s always worth it.
There’s buckets of it where it comes from.
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