August 7th, 2006 - 5th Bible Study Whol – i - ness with Myself, Others and God.

Hosts: Paul & Debi Stromberg

Topic: How is your love life?

Bible Verse: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13


A small group gathered tonight. There was no need to split into two groups and there was plenty to eat.

First of all we talked about how these verses were part of everyone's weddings with two exceptions, Mary and I being one.

This was the first bible study Mary and I were together for the discussion. The first question we answered, "When in your life have you felt the most loved?" we both flashed first on a poinsettia I gave her for Christmas while she was still in Wisconsin.

For her it was special because it was a gift from me. For me, it was how she nurtured and kept it alive for years afterwards. She would let me know, by letter, how it was doing. We had two different perpectives but the same story. We had never talked about that before as something that let us know were deeply loved and our synchronicity on that surprised me.

The talk moved to how the love described in the passage differed from the love typically defined in our culture. Shirley stressed our culture's insistence on on bringing in the conditional, "I will love you if...". Susan followed up with a powerful story about her parents supporting and loving one of her sisters though she did something in opposition to their moral value system. We also talked about the focus on romantic love and that our cultural stories practically ignore the deep love people have towards one another after their initial romantic love.

Each question led us deeper into our faith and our search within to extend the love 1st Corinthians describes. There were stories of disappointment and stories of perserverance - what has troubled and supported the faith of each of us around the table. When we talked specifically about how to develop the ability to love others within ourselves Paul felt there had to be a love of who we are within us before we could move outward with our love.

There was a question about verses 8-10 and in what way they put our church in perspective. Susan gave us an inspirational update on the call for an Associate Pastor. We talked about how sometimes in the midst of the work done for the church we can lose sight of why we are doing it and just get caught up in the busy part of the activity.

When we talked about meeting Jesus face to face, which was the last question, some people could not get their thoughts around that. Sarah talked about how important a question this was for her Pentecostal friends. For her it was hard to focus when she tried to imagine the answer to this question.

There were several people who imagined what it was like when hearing a couple of Kelly's songs being performed. One was Come As You Are. The other was All That I Am. For these people, these songs captured something that triggered their imagination of meeting Jesus face to face. I am always impressed by the power Kelly's songs have on those of us priviledged to hear them.

We sang Great Is The Lord to close the bible study. Once again I was struck how the bible study groups are not afraid to reveal their hearts.