We call our home the Love Well Homestead. Sometimes I sort of put it together into one word. Lovewell. An internet search reveals many others who have adopted the same name. It is ok. I first heard the phrase, love well, from someone else too.
Point is that the name is also our mission. We want to love well. As Bob Goff says, everyone always. That’s a pretty tall order. We come to the table with all sorts of personal scars and phobias that stand contrary to the idea of loving well, everyone, all the time. It is no easy task and we really aren’t nearly as good at it as it sounds, but we are getting closer, one silly milometer at a time.
Our home houses more than just our family. We have both long term and short term guests who reside. We also have a table that we invite others to join us around. We are in a sort of way a reflection of the early Celtic monastery, which itself was a reflection of what we see in the Book of Acts.
Our hope, by loving well, everyone, always, is that our love reflects Christ’s love for us. We hope that love will spread, maybe even infect a few folk. Before long they will be loving well, everyone, always, and pretty soon everyone gets a generous helping at the table of love.
Meanwhile, every day we live our lives. More often it is the mundane of survival. Going to work, cleaning house, planting veggies (my wife is outdoing herself in this area) and learning how to relate in love to one another. There are far more opportunities to not than there are to. Living in close proximity is tough.
Since community is tougher the closer you get, we have a habit in this place at this point in history to keep our community loose and compartmentalized. I mean we as a culture in general. Closeness requires vulnerability. We all have a few scars we can show that we earned by being vulnerable. Am I right? Whew, some of them are quite deep. The thing is that God started us out as a community. The reflection of the God story in the Bible is about a community, a family, called out with the interesting task of blessing everyone, always. That’s what He meant when he said to Abe that through him all the nations would be blessed. That is pretty much everyone.
We are living like this mostly because we were called to do so. There is an old saying, God rarely calls the equipped, He equips who He calls. That means we are learning as we go. So much of the time we are making it up as we go. Sort of like those early Irish monks did. It really hacks the religious types. The call is for us to love them to. They are part of the everyone tribe. Wow. See how tough this gets the deeper you go?
Love Well Homestead, our own little Celtic Monastery of sorts, lies just a few hundred yards from the intersection of Washington State Highways 20 and 21. Do you need love? Don’t we all, right? Well, we are trying our best to have some love to spare, and maybe a place at the table too. Stop in, give a shout, or simply like this short message, and let us know about it. Perhaps you will want to linger and be a part of our growing community of imperfect followers of Christ and flawed practitioners of love. This invitation is for everyone, always.
simplecelt 