The Church is messy and deeply imperfect. We are a mosaic of broken people attempting to represent a good and perfect God to a watching and wondering world. Sometimes we forget that we’re not a place or a physical building, and we don’t exist for ourselves.

There’s a lot that could be said about our mistakes, our shortcomings, and our failings. Certainly, there’s also plenty to be said on the other side—our kindness and grace and love that help make this world better. But these days, I don’t think the good is the first to come to people’s minds. 

To many, the Church represents judgement and exclusion. It represents this idea of not being good enough or hypocrisy, and this breaks my heart. This wasn’t who Jesus designed us to be. In His final moments with His friends, Jesus told them that the watching world would know they were His disciples by their love. 

By their love. 

Not programs or services or pastors or size, because that’s not what’s most important. 

In the last few weeks, I’ve had the absolute gift of being welcomed into the homes of refugees in Chicago. I’ve been to this particular neighborhood so many times, and every interaction with the families there molds my heart a little bit more into something more beautiful and holy. 

These families remind me that while our stories and histories might be very different, we’re more similar than might seem. And that incredibly humbling position they find themselves in isn’t something they asked for. It’s simply their reality, and they’re trying to hold onto joy in the midst of a whole lot of change—like our friends who moved from a village in Burma to a small basement apartment in Chicago.

When I first visited this sweet family, I almost missed their door. My friend, Bob led me down a flight of stairs to their basement home. Their living room was small, cramped, and dark. Although plants and flowers littered the space, there was very little natural light, and I couldn’t help but think of how different their new home was compared to the almost constant sun and heat of Burma. 

Our visit was a sweet time of encouraging and praying with a family who finds themselves in the trenches day after day, but the greatest act of love came later when we were in the car. From the front seat, I heard my friend on the phone with another refugee who is an incredible artist. 

“I want you to paint something for her apartment,” Bob said. “Her home needs a little beauty. It’s dark and needs the light that your paintings bring."

As I listened to the conversation, I was overcome with this simple yet extraordinary act of love. Is there a holier picture of the Church than what unfolded that night? 

The world will know you by your love. 

Our friends from Burma don’t need this painting. They need food and a stable income to pay the bills, and people are walking with them in these needs. But our friends’ souls need beauty. They need joy. They need light and life. They need hope.

They need reminders that they are not forgotten. 
They need reminders that they are remembered and seen.
On the hardest of days, they need reminders that they are loved.

On our hardest days, we all need these reminders. We are not forgotten. We are remembered and seen. We are loved. This is the heart beat of the Church isn’t it—to remind people, to remember and see people, to love people at their very worst and their best.

More and more I am convinced that this is the role of the Church—the beautifully imperfect group the Father designed so very long ago. The Church looks like visiting the homes of the hurting and marginalized around us. It looks like bringing bags of rice and bottles of oil or a plate of cookies. It looks like pausing long enough to find out how our neighbor is really doing. It looks like filling their home with conversation and prayer. 

And it also looks like bringing all of our gifts and talents to the table—like painting a picture of flowers for our neighbor. Because these Holy Spirit given gifts have an incredible power to bring light and life. These gifts are how we love. And the world will know we are followers of Jesus by our love. 

This is the way the Church was meant to be.

“So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.”
John 13:34-35

The post The World Will Know You by Your Love appeared first on Kate Berkey.

It was an honor.
It was a privilege. 
It was humbling. 

I made sure to take off my shoes before I walked into the friend of my friend’s home partly because of culture and partly because of that verse in Exodus. I still believe holy ground exists in things that seem completely mundane or simply different or quite possibly even extraordinary.  

On this night, my friends and I were completely and utterly stuffed after a dinner of curry and naan and rice pudding and sweet donuts soaked in syrup and oil. Each of us tried to stretch our pants a little before sitting on the floor around the family’s table. Kids seemed to come from out of nowhere in this Chicago one bedroom apartment. They crowded around the table with us, focusing on the cartoon playing on the iPad rather than the ragtag group in their living room. Their sweet mother and auntie disappeared into the kitchen despite our constant pleas. 

“Please come sit with us.”
“We don’t need any food.”
“Sit here.” 
“Oh, thank you for the noodles.”
“Please come sit with us.”
“We came to be with you.” 

It was hospitality at its finest, especially to our dear friends from Burma. They passed heaping plates of fried noodles and giant glasses of fruit punch around the table until we all had more than enough. We exhaled slowly, unsure of how another bite of food would fit into our bellies. But this family had given out of what they had, and we would try desperately to honor them. 

Only when we were all happily eating did the sweet mother sit with us—wrapping her beautifully colored skirt around her feet. We did not come to be served by her. We did not come for another meal. We did not come to take. 

We came to be with this family. We came to be with this sweet mother.

As chatter swirled around the room, I saw her fidgeting beside me, fumbling on her phone. I saw the picture then—her son, brand new and beautiful. She passed the phone over me to the friend she knew more than the stranger next to her. 

It was a sacred moment of pride and sorrow like how I imagine Moses’ mother must have felt when she floated him in a basket that she prayed would save him from the river's current and the depths below. 

This boy—her brand new baby—did not come out crying. He did not come out breathing. This sweet mother pushed and cried through pain to give birth to a baby who wasn’t alive. They called him stillborn, but this was not his name. 

We did not come to be served. We did not come for another meal. We did not come to take. 
We came to be with sweet mother. 

In that sterile hospital room just weeks before, there were tears. There were cries. But it didn’t come from her baby. It came from sweet mother and sweet father—refugees in this strange land trying to build a home and life for their family. And in the weeks since this story-defining moment, there would be more tears—from the pain of recovering from childbirth, from the replaying of that moment in her mind, from the moments she could almost feel her son’s body in her arms only to look down and see nothing and no one. 

Often, I write about brave living—how it turns up in the most unexpected places. I’m not going to pretend that I was brave in that moment. I was speechless; I could only reach over and put my hand on sweet mother’s knee. The chatter and the cartoon playing in the background faded. It was a moment for my friend and sweet mother and me—the random stranger who was lucky enough for an invitation to the table. 

Brave living—in that moment—belonged to this sweet mother. Because she did not continue to serve us. She did not stay busy. She did not hide in the kitchen. She sat with her friend and a stranger. And she pulled out one of the only pictures she will ever have of her baby called stillborn. She passed him to us, one of the greatest treasures and sorrows of her heart.

And all we could say was, “He is so beautiful. He is cúndoijja.” 

We made sweet mother smile at the sound of our terrible pronunciation of this beautiful Rohingya word. Her smile, another act of bravery. 

I had no business being in this room, in this space with such a sweet mother—the kind who comforts her crying children, who finds refuge in a new country for their safety, who tries to teach them parts of their culture in a brand new place so different from the old. I had been invited to holy ground that was found in the sacred ordinary. I was surrounded by bravery and humbled by my place at the table. 

We did not come to be served. We did not come for another meal. We did not come to take. 

We came to be with sweet mother—the bravest one in the room. 

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