“Every time I wonder who I should love and for how long I should love them, God continues to whisper to me: Everybody, always.” –Bob Goff

After a big snowfall, ski resorts take every precaution possible to make sure that the risk of an avalanche is abated. They fire off blasts to purposefully set off mini avalanches when no one is on the slopes. Then, ski patrol cuts across potential fracture lines to make sure no other mounds of snow will be set loose. It’s deliberate, methodical, and diminishes danger before the seemingly innocent snow can do major harm. 

Lately, I have been convicted to chase avalanches. I know that sounds weird, but what I really mean is that I feel an extra nudge to love hard people. You know the ones. They’re not who you might normally pick for your inner circle, because they attract more drama, or have a completely different worldview, or are takers without reciprocally giving back. The ones you are considering blocking on Facebook or want to ignore in general because they’re just plain weird according to your scale of normal-ness. 

To be clear, I think everyone who professes to love Jesus is called to this loving-hard-people business, but I know that I have rarely done this well. It’s way easier to love the people in my life who I like – the easy, breezy, beautiful ones. The ones who make me feel good. Hold my same beliefs. Dress like me, have the same level of education, and maybe grew up in middle class white America too. (Yes, I realize I’m brown.) The ones who don’t smell funky, don’t ask me for anything hard, or require true sacrifice on my part. 

Besides, common logic tells me that loving hard people is d-u-m-b. Seriously. Why put myself in situations where I feel drained and maybe even annoyed? Why put myself at risk to feel foolish or worse, unsafe? Why inconvenience myself when I can pat myself on the back for being a great friend to the people in my immediate circles?

Then I remember that I am probably a hard person to someone else. And I wonder what the world would be like without people like Mother Teresa who loved people who couldn’t give anything back. Like Malala Yousafzi who refuses to hate her attackers but instead preaches a message of peace amidst threats and danger while fighting for the education of young women. People like Bob Goff who eventually befriended someone most of us would consider pure evil who then turned around and “became love,” as Bob eloquently puts it in his book Everybody, Always.

Here’s the problem: we aren’t called to a life of safety – we are called to a life of purpose. We can’t always be deliberate and methodical in order to diminish danger. We don’t always have the tools to cut across the potential fracture lines of our comfortable lives or our comfortable souls. The thing we have to do is to make sure we are living a life that matters in the first place. We have to come out from hiding behind the wall of busyness or fear or insecurity. We have to step into this calling to love our enemies despite the risk, or even because of it.  Trust me when I say that I am writing this post first and foremost to myself.

Because in God’s economy we are called to love people – and to do so not because they’ll love us back, but in spite of the knowledge that they never will.

What that means is that we have to choose to put on an avi pack, pray that we we don’t get buried, and live in a way that puts us in the middle of an avalanche zone. And now that it’s here in writing, you can hold me accountable for being on the slopes this season.

[Photo: my friend Marlise on our trip to Hokkaido, Japan in January 2018. We were both wearing literal avalanche packs on this particular day.]