To love or not to love.

I hope you all had a very merry  Christmas! My family definitely did. We spent a few days down in Oregon with our grandparents and cousins on my dad's side of the family, then came back for  Christmas Day and spent the afternoon and evening with my mom's side of the family.
 
On Christmas Eve night, I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep. I was thinking about how long ago Jesus came - how God had seemed to disappear from them for four hundred years, and how it's been two thousand more years since then. Somehow I realized that, since Jesus was born in 4 BC and I was born in AD 1996, we were born almost exactly 2000 years apart. How cool is that?

Anyways, I just thought that might be interesting to somebody other than me.

So. It's that time of year - the week between  Christmas and New Years. I'm cleaning up my room, Jaci and my mom are going shopping for the day-after- Christmas sales, and we're putting away Christmas presents. Basically, we're preparing for 2013.

And something I've been reading in lately is 1 John. I'd never really read the whole thing through before, and I have found it to really be a challenging book for me.

Especially the passage that really keeps catching my attention, which is 1 John 4:19-21 - "We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister."

See the text that I put in bold font? That's the part that really gets me every time I read this passage. Almost as if I'm in a boxing match and my opponent gives me a good blow in the stomach. Fortunately, it isn't a blow I can't recover from.

Not just myself, but I pray that all of my brothers and sisters have the strength and humility to love each other so that we can, in turn, love God this next year and all the rest of our lives.

And I hope that Jesus had a very happy birthday! Thanks for reading!