The Invasion of the Drag Queens

This morning I read some words that I’ve read many times before…but this time they caused three questions to bubble up inside me.  Here are the words…

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 John 4: 7-12)

OK – so here are the three questions:

1.     What is the evidence that a person has been “born of God?”

2.     What is the evidence that a person “knows” God?

3.     What is the evidence that God “lives in” a person?

A four-lettered-word answers all three of these questions.  I just needed to see it again, I suppose…to be reminded.  Then in my devotional reading from a book I highly recommend – Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Day by Day, by Peter Scazzero – I read the story of a man named Paul who lived and worked among the poor in North Africa.  He had been an engineer in Paris, but God called him to leave everything behind, and live and work among the poor.  Paul’s friend, Carlo Carletto, wrote about traveling across the desert on a camel, and coming upon a group of 50 men working on a road in the burning sun.  Carletto stopped to offer them water, and found his friend Paul…the engineer from Paris…working side-by-side with these men.  Why would Paul choose to do something like that?  Then Carletto wrote,

If out of love, Brother Paul has chosen to die on a desert track, by this he is justified. If out of love others build schools and hospitals, by this they were justified. If, out of love, Thomas Aquinas spent his life among books, by this he was justified…I can only say, “Live love. Let love invade you. It will never fail to teach you what you must do. (Scazerro, pp. 173-74)

This week, Emily Kate’s class from BSC went on a field trip to an HIV/AIDS clinic in Birmingham.  At this clinic, they do all the things you would expect…treatment, counseling, etc…  But Monday nights are special. Monday night is BINGO night.  Some local drag queens come in on Monday night and call BINGO.

Do you know what a love invasion looks like?  It might look like a French engineer building a road in the desert.  It might also look like drag queens calling BINGO at an HIV/AIDS clinic on Monday nights. 

“Live love. Let love invade you…it will never fail to teach you what you must do.”