Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart.

‭‭1 Peter‬ ‭1‬:‭22
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I don’t do earnestly well. I default to casually doing things. And casual love, though the social norm, isn’t impactful, meaningful or long lasting.

Worse, it isn’t usually honest either.

Love should cauterize my relationship with others. It isn’t water to be thrown around in hopes of washing away the things that threaten right relationship.

It’s the fiery, painful seal that burns away past wrongs.

It’s directed outward not inward.

But it doesn’t just happen automatically either. In response to the truth, having purified our souls in obedience to the truth…then we have a chance to live out this earnest, dangerous, awesome love.

We lose this perception in our addiction, if we ever had a glimpse of it to begin with.

We are lost in the folds of ourself. The world and the people in it become very small. We seek out ways to chisel the truth away from our minds, and our addiction happily satisfies.

The first steps toward this radical, real and sustaining love come maybe before we are sober. They come from somewhere or someone else.

A moment of clarity is underwritten in love.

Sure, it’s self centered at that point probably. Mine was. But it’ll do to get started. It’ll do to latch hold of and start walking toward the light.

We can’t hope to ever live out a dangerous, pure and selfless love without being given an example to follow. God is the wellspring, but there are plenty of practical examples in the people around us. We just choose well who to surround ourselves with in sobriety and become obedient to a new way of life.

God, show me who to learn from.