Do We Forget To Love?

Living in a world of Christianity, we are taught that God is love and we should be like God.

Yet Love seems to be abandoned.

Why do we shun those who are different?

Why are we hateful towards the people who have wronged us?

I am far from perfect, we all are. But, i try my best to love every person. No matter how much they may annoy me or how much we disagree on. I am a person who avoids conflict. I say sorry even if i am right sometimes. I just want everyone to be friends, with no conflicts or disagreements whatsoever. But i know thats not going to happen.

Well i suppose it could... in a perfect world.

This is my world, at a Bible College. There are clicks. Yes there are.

We don't want to admit it. We say it is a happy community where everyone is friends with everyone. Im sorry to burst your bubble, but its just not true.

Call its click what you want, but we are all in one. With the exception of some "floaters" who rome around befriending and accepting everyone. If only we could all be like that.

What happens is people do not get accepted into some clicks. I have had a few people tell me they don't feel excepted by one person or another. Thats just how it is. No matter who you are or where you are.

Anyways, that besides the point.

People just don't accept the "different" ones.

The ones who share their opinion, or dress different, or don't always have a Christ-like character. Often they are not accepted because they do not conform to the ways of everyone else. I suppose everyone would get along if we did all conform to be the same cookie cutter people who live in a box. But then we wouldn't be us now would we.

So, in this complicated social life, what are we to do?

Should we conform to fit in?

Or should we stand up for what we believe in and be ourselves?

Well, I say that Love is the answer.

Even when someone is driving you up the wall.

Love

Even if someone has hurt you, to a point where you feel you cannot forgive.

Love

How do we Love?

Love one another with brotherly affection [as members of one family], giving precedence and showing honor to one another.
Romans 12: 10

Love does no wrong to one's neighbor [it never hurts anybody]. Therefore love meets all the requirements and is the fulfilling of the Law. Romans 13: 10

Let love for your fellow believers continue and be a fixed practice with you [never let it fail]. Hebrews 13: 1

How do we forgive?

He who covers and forgives an offense seeks love, but he who repeats or harps on a matter separates even close friends.Proverbs 17: 9

For if you forgive people their trespasses [their reckless and willful sins, leaving them, letting them go, and giving up resentment], your heavenly Father will also forgive you.Matthew 6: 14

For I will be merciful and gracious toward their sins and I will remember their deeds of unrighteousness no more.
Hebrews 8: 12

Testimonial

My name is Justine Danielle Hunt, I was raised in a Christian family. My mother and father are Sue and Phil Hunt. I grew up in Williams Lake, BC. As a child my parents had regular bible studies and prayers with me so I do not remember when I first gave my life to God as I was very young. But, I had a definite moment in my life that affected my life greatly, this is a moment that made God real to me. But of course there is a story behind that moment that I feel cannot be left out.

Starting around age 13 I started going to a Pentecostal camp in the summer with a good friend of mine. This camp was called Cowichan River Bible Camp and it had a great impact on my faith. The views and teachings that this camp had where what made God real to me. In the chapel services the speakers talked about spiritual gifts and the supernatural. During the worship times I saw people healed by God, I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, and given the gift of tongues. There were many other supernatural occurrences.

During the preteen and young teenage years of my life I was obsessed with the supernatural powers of God. I saw angels and demons, I prophesied, and I prayed for healing. There where good and bad things that came along with this obsession. The good was that I became closer and closer to God and strived to know him more. This was the pinnacle of my spiritual walk with God, I had never been more close to Him in my life. The bad thing about it was that spiritual gifts became something of a competition with my close friend. I felt that I was never good enough. I felt that to be loved and considered important and special in Gods eyes and important to him I thought that I must have every spiritual gift and I must prophesy, heal, see angels, and see miracles in every shape and form. It became a competition of spiritual "powers". This opened my spirit up for anything supernatural, and it became dangerous as it opened up doors for evil spirits as well as good spirits to get in. This opening up of the spirit was happening to my best friend, whom I will keep anonymous. She let evil spirits get in and it resulted in her becoming very depressed, which led her to physically hurt herself. Because she was my best friend I usually followed her in everything we did as we where very emotionally close. This caused me to also fall into depression and I also started hurting myself by cutting.

Being in this state of depression and competition to be loved by God, my friendship was shattered. I felt that I was not as good as my best friend and I felt like she wanted me to be like her and that if I wasn't like her, I wasn’t good enough. This resulted in many conflicts between us that were happening for other reasons. By loosing my closest friend I fell even deeper into depression. I started to close my mind off to anything positive, even though I had two very close friends at the time. I did not appreciate them and I felt like I was alone.

This resulted in me getting into the popular but dangerous trend of being "emo". This caused me to, in a way, enjoy being depressed because that is what "emo" people do. I started doing everything I could to fit this persona. I had to listen to the right music, dress and act a certain way, talk to certain people among other things. So I started making online friends on a website called myspace because that was the thing to do. These where people I had never met in person and I became too close to someone online which was very dangerous. I thought that this "person" was my only true friend who really understood me. I became so attached to this person that nothing else in life mattered. I was dependent on this friendship that wasn't even real. This relationship that I thought was love effected me greatly emotionally. One day over the internet I was told that this person had died. To this day I do not know who this person was, or if they were who they said they were. But at the time of hearing that they had passed away my world was shattered. This caused me to draw farther from God and from the people who loved me. I became very serious about suicide.

In the midst of this deep depression I decided to go back to Cowichan River Bible Camp for the whole summer. I felt that it would take a long time for God to heal me. I am surprised that I was even open to coming to God at the time. I believe that he put this desire on my heart. I ended up going to camp and I was surrounded by worship and love, yet I did not take it in. I felt useless and unwanted, until the last night of the first week of camp. I began participating in the worship. How could I not? It was so spiritually intense. I began to hear angels singing as I smelled the sweet smell of God’s presence. I was soaked in the river of the Holy Spirit. It was rushing over me, I could not ignore it. I began to sing, and as I sang I heard the still small voice of God in my mind. He said "your singing brings people to praise". I thought that I was just making things up in my mind so I stopped singing; when I stopped the people around me became silent. So I started singing again and the people around me sang louder and began jumping up and down. I thought it was weird so I did it a few times to see if I would get the same result, and I did, every time. Again and again I would hear God say "your singing brings people to praise". I heard it until I truly believed it. It was at that point in my life that I found unexplainable joy.

After this spiritual occurrence I felt that I had to go home. I felt that God wanted me to go home and I didn't know why. I soon found out why when I came home and started to find a new group of wonderful friends who are still my friends to this day. I had been praying for a fresh start with new friends for so long, and that summer God answered my prayers.

All I had to do was reach out to God. He was there all along, I was just ignoring him. I am glad that I finally came to God with open arms knowing that He loves me for who I am. I have realized that God will love me no matter what I do. It is not a competition about who God loves more because he loves us all equally. I know that if God can pull me out of deep depression He can save me from anything. He loves everyone and longs for us all to come to Him. He is holding us, He has a firm grip on our hearts. He loves us more than we could ever know. So why would we ever want to ignore His love? His love is more powerful than any earthly thing could ever be.

These are lyrics to a song by Flyleaf that I feel really speak about my walk with God and how he saved my life, literally.

Here I stand

Empty hands

Wishing my wrists were bleeding

To stop the pain from the beatings

There you stood

Holding me

Waiting for me to notice you

But who are you

You are the truth (you are the truth)

Outscreaming these lies

You are the truth (you are the truth)

Saving my life

Who Am I

This is a paper i wrote at Summit Pacific College for Spiritual Issues class.

Personal Gifting Summary

Spiritual Issues                                                                                                   Juss Hunt

Dave Demchuk                                                                                                Oct 22, 2010

            In this essay I will describe to you my personal gifting and my personality traits.  I have taken personality surveys that have helped me to discover who I am. From those surveys I discovered that I am an idealist who is introverted, intuitive, perceiving, and is affected by feelings. I have also discovered that my dominant spiritual gift is discerning of spirits.  All of these factors play a role in who I am and how I go about things. 

I am an idealist

 Many of my characteristics come from the fact that I am an idealist. This affects the way I interact with people and the way that I think. I see many examples in my life that bring out the idealist characteristics in me. 

An aspect of idealism that describes me well is that I am concerned with personal growth. I am always analyzing myself trying to discover who I am and how I can become the best that I can be. I am always focused on my personal journey and the journey of others.

 Another aspect that comes out of being an idealist is that I am a romantic. I find this to be true when I look at the relationship I have had with my boyfriend whom I have been with for three years; he is the only person I have been with. Our relationship as definitely been affected by me being an idealist, because I yearn for romance and I pride myself on being kind hearted, loving and authentic.  In my relationship I want to have a close bond emotionally and spiritually. I want to share with him my deepest feelings and complex personal world.

  Another thing that affects me by being an idealist is how I react to conflict and confrontation. Conflict upsets me because idealists feel at ease when everyone is getting along. But when there is conflict I become uncomfortable. An example of this in my life is when my parents would have heated discussions/debates with my sister. From my point of view as an idealist I thought that they were mad at each other, it made me very uncomfortable and I didn’t want to be involved. But I talked to them later and they said that they were not mad at each other; they were simply talking things through. The fact that I am an idealist really affects the way I go about things.  

Idealists do not like to be insincere or dishonest. This affects my personal relationships in many different ways. For one thing I am very hard on myself if I am dishonest or fake. I always make sure to be myself. This means that I do not like shallow relationships because they feel fake to me. I like to have a few close, deep relationships with people. Being this way can be good or bad. It is good because I am honest and I have very good relationships with my few good friends. It can be bad because I can be brutally honest sometimes witch upsets people. Also I do not have many friends and am socially awkward because I hate small talk. Quite often I may feel left out because of this, but I will never be a person who conforms to the crowd. I will always be myself.

I am introverted

Because I am introverted I enjoy exploring my thoughts and feelings. I am always in the inner world of my mind. I am constantly thinking about my feelings and the feelings of others. I always try to figure people out, myself included.

             

            A characteristic of mine that comes from being introverted is that being around people drains my energy. I am usually very quite when socializing in a crowd of people because of this. I am not completely introverted because I do love being around people, I just don’t like small talk. I think that a social activity that I consider shallow drains my energy. I don’t like social activities that don’t involve conversation about ideas, concepts, feelings, or anything else deep. Small talk often feels meaningless to me; I cherish deep conversations that help me get to really know people. If I don’t see into the heart of a person from the personal things they tell me, then I will try to figure that person out when there is very little I know about them. I always want to get to know people on a personal basis, which is why I dislike small talk.

 I Am Intuitive

            Intuition means that I have a direct perception of truth and quick insight. I can see signs of intuition in my personality when I get premonitions, or visions of things that happen before knowing that they will happen. I have had many times in my life when I have predicted things to happen and they have. I can often predict how a relationship will turn out. For example when I first meet my roommate I predicted that she would be a lot of fun but not a very deeply close friend. I predicted that she would take a while to open up to me and that she has a hard time talking about her feelings and other deep personal things. From knowing her for almost two months I found this to be true in many ways. She is a lot of fun and she did take a long time to feel comfortable in sharing things with me. Also she still isn’t a very deep person. I had these intuitions about her by just observing her the first day I met her. This intuitive “sixth sense” is very present with me at all times. Some may say that I am judgmental and I can be. But usually my judgments are right.

I Am Perceiving

Perceiving people are spontaneous, adaptable and open, among other things. I can see how I am a perceiving person because I have all of those qualities. I am spontaneous because I rarely plan things in advance. I make big decisions quickly at times. I do really random things without planning them. I might just drive to a friend’s without telling them. I might go on a road trip not knowing where I’m going. I am flexible; I can change my plans suddenly. I am also open. I am not opinionated. I am willing to accept other people’s opinions, ideas or suggestions. I am not trying to hide anything from anyone. These are all perceiving character traits.

I Am Affected by Feelings

            A lot of my life is based on my feelings and the feelings of others. If I have a bad feeling about something or a sense with my intuition the bad feelings of others I will generally have a bad day. An example of this is when a friend of mine told me that they broke up with their girlfriend of three years I had a very sad day after that. It affected how I lived the rest of my day. My thoughts were negative towards many things. I kept thinking that nothing was going to work out for the better and things were always going to end bad no matter what it was that people were talking about or what I was thinking about. This affected my day greatly just because of the sad feeling I got from that one person. This happens to me all of the time. If I am around a happy person I will feel happy and be more positive towards life.

            Most of the time I am affected badly by feelings. I am very easily prone to depression and negativity. I am easily brought to having negative feelings about everything. But the fact that I know this is true helps me to deal with the negative feelings. When I know I have a problem I learn how to deal with it. I have learned that is I am affected by bad feelings then I should find someone with good, happy feeling to brighten my day.

I Have the Gift of Discernment of Spirits

            Discerning of Spirits affects my personality and lifestyle. Discerning of spirits is the ability to know what is of God and what is not of God. It is the ability to evaluate people as well. For example I can evaluate people when they are teaching, preaching, or prophesying. I am able to distinguish what is true and false. This also plays a role into my intuition because I can tell when someone is being sincere; I can discover things about people through this gift.

            Some examples of discerning of spirits in my life are the following stories. A few times in the past I have been acquainted with spirits and I have been able to tell when they were good or evil spirits. At times the people around me thought that someone was filled with spirits from God during a worship service but I knew that it was an evil spirit. A while after I noticed this at a camp a leader there noticed it too and asked us to leave so the leaders could pray for the person. That leader also had the discernment of spirits. Another example is when I listen to preachers in churches or other places. I have a feeling when someone is preaching false teachings even thought I was not well educated. Afterwards I would ask a leader if that they where preaching was theologically correct or whatever it may be, and I found out the truth about what I sensed about the teachings. This is a good gift for me to have because I am able to question people, I don’t just believe everything people say. God tugs at my heart when something is not right.

My Personality

            All of these things have a role in forming my personality. I am who I am because of the way I was raised and the people who influenced my life. A lot of these personality traits come from my parents. I have gotten my intuition from them and I am introverted like my dad. They way they have raised me affects my personality in many ways. My sister and my peers have also affected my personality. But God is the one who made me and gave me my character.