How do I love thee?

One of the interesting things about Paul's letters in the New Testament is that several of them include prayers he prays for the letter's recipients.  I've found them to be great prayers to pray for our own lives as well.  Check this one out from  Philippians 1:

"And this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ - to the glory and praise of God." - Philippians 1:9-11

This is a prayer that I'm praying as a Chaplain in Afghanistan.  I wear a Cross on my chest everyday and I want to show people the love of Christ, but what does that look like in my situation?  We often have pat answers to this, but Paul's prayer seems to point to something more.  Somehow knowledge and insight are connected to love - a deeper kind of love.  This knowledge and insight, he says, helps us discern what is best, pure, and blameless, and it leads to the fruit of righteousness.

Maybe we need more knowledge, depth of insight, and discernment to know what it means to 'love' the people around us.  Certainly loving them is more than just being nice and overlooking wrongs just so that they feel loved.  That doesn't take much knowledge or insight.  Maybe loving is confrontational sometimes.  I know that discipline is loving, and I know that if I really love someone I let them know of the wrong decisions and how they affect their lives.  It doesn't always feel loving to the person, but it still is the most loving thing to do for them.  It takes discernment, it takes insight to know how to 'love' the people around us.

Paul's prayer in Philippians 1 is going to be my prayer for the next several days.  There's a lot of people around me that need to know the love of Christ, but I don't always know how to show it.  That's why I'm going to pray after Paul.  Maybe the one who answers, "How do I love thee..." is God.