Learning to Love…

I have a keen dislike for filth, disease and chaos. And most everyone else I know feels the same. Yet recently I have been impelled to reexamine my attitude toward these very things.

This world is steeped in the results of sin. There is no doubt about that. Everywhere I turn I see hurting exemplifications of humanity. And what I see doesn’t even scratch the surface…

It pains my heart.

Kirsten Dysinger

I wonder why…
Why was I allowed the privilege of a happy, normal home while the majority of the world exist with dysfunctional homes, destructive addictions, unfathomable poverty, gruesome wars, mistreatment, persecution, and other things I shudder to mention?

Glesni Mason

Then I pause and reconsider my own life… and I realize that I am just as impoverished and despicable as the most degraded of today’s society. Maybe more…

How can God love such an utterly miserable, disfigured person as myself? What motivated Him to risk all, to relinquish incomprehensible glory and power so that he might stoop to my debased level and save me? How could He discern the potential for beauty beneath my grime and wretchedness? 

Yet if He sees beauty in my ugliness, shouldn’t I learn to see beauty in ugliness too? I’m not talking about cherishing the condition. I mean seeing the capacity for beauty beneath the condition, unconditionally loving despite any unsightly externals.

Hasn’t He entrusted me with the responsibility to love the unlovable, the disfigured, the calloused, the abnormal, the dirty, the uncouth? Haven’t I been instructed to view every individual through the eyes of God, as a precious treasure?

Glesni Mason

Glesni Mason 

Oh, let me love as Christ loves.
Open my eyes to see the treasure beneath layers of filth, deformity, guilt and pain…

And let me remember that every life matters…

Glesni Mason

Glesni Mason

Glesni Mason

How can you not love these faces?