If you're not sure if God is real, seriously invite God into your life. It's OK to say "God, if you're real, help me to find you." It's a fair risk to take - unless you're afraid that God will take you up on your offer. And it's important to admit to yourself if it IS fear holding you back - fear of losing control, fear of what God will ask of you. It's true: asking God into your life is an exercise in trust.
Inviting God into your life is the first step to loving God, because anyone whom we find worthwhile, we make a part of our life - they receive our texts, phone calls, and dinner invitations. They laugh with us and cry with us. Inviting God to be part of our ordinary days and nights acknowledges that God WANTS to be part of our lives and frees God to actively work with us to bring even more love into our daily activities and relationships. Amazingly, you'll discover that life has a different, truer, deeper dimension when you speak to God on a daily basis. You'll find new courage, new insights, new acceptance of what life gives you and withholds from you. A new ability to love with commitment. A new capacity to accept that God really loves YOU.
Once you've asked God into your life, you can grow in knowing and loving your neighbor. First, you find the strength to work to better the communication and commitment in your family and friend relationships. To truly take the time to look into the eyes of those nearest to you and put their needs above your wants. To take the time to simply be WITH them instead of being a slave to your work or your hobbies.
Then, suddenly, gradually, as you pay attention to the Gospel teachings, you also discover that, as God calls all of us His children, there is no one in this world who is NOT your neighbor. Now that can be truly frightening - and make you wonder why you even wanted to try out this faith business to begin with.
Life seems easier when we have a small, tight, controllable group of people to contend with. These days, the number of communities we belong to can become even smaller. I love the Internet, but it's easy to withdraw from real human encounters to message people we don't have to face, to shop without encountering a salesclerk or other shoppers, to order dinner delivered instead of to enter a restaurant and have to "endure" other diners. The more isolated and solitary we grow in our use of technological play things, the more the milk of human kindness dries up as we expect to order what we want when we want it - and no interference, please. Even our personal relationships can founder when we text or play online all the time instead of call or personally visit.
But nothing widens your heart and deepens your understanding of the human race like talking on an informal, equal basis to the sales clerk selling you shoes, to the fellow diner who has a new baby, to a neighbor you run into at an aisle in a super market, to the widow or widower at your place of work. As your heart deepens in understanding, you can find yourself opening to new experiences: visiting with an African immigrant cab driver, an ex-prisoner, a drug addict, a refugee in a sanctuary, a teen sorting out his or her sexuality, an unwed mother in a House of Hospitality, a homeless family in a Church building. You find yourself laughing and weeping with the "sort' of people whom you may never have thought you'd ever know. And you know your life is incalculably enriched for knowing them and discovering your common humanity. Amazingly, as our acquaintanceships grow, love flows more readily out from us, until it's an ever-flowing stream of mercy. LIVED FAITH SOFTENS OUR HEARTS. LIVED FAITH MAKES US HUMAN BEINGS.
But, you ask, how could I possibly ever love my enemies? Loving our enemies implies being able to forgive them. Here is a powerful story:
"Dr. Everett Worthington has spent his professional career studying forgiveness. As professor and chair of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University and as the executive director of A Campaign for Forgiveness Research founded by the John Templeton Foundation, Dr. Worthington, perhaps more than most, is deeply acquainted with the psychological process of forgiveness. In 1995, when burglars broke into his mother's home in Tennessee and brutally murdered his elderly mother, beating her to death with a crowbar, and violating her with a broken bottle, he also came to know the process on a much more raw and personal level.
"As Dr. Worthington paced the floor debating himself after his mother's murder, he began to apply the principles he himself had taught. REACH was the acrostic he had used to teach forgiveness: Recall the hurt, Empathize, Altruistic gift of forgiveness, Commit publicly to forgive, and Hold on to forgiveness.
"First, he recalled the hurt. With the psychological wound still fresh, this was not difficult. So he remembered, he tried to see the events unfold from the offender's point of view, so as to somehow come to empathize with him. As vividly as Dr. Worthington could imagine, he recreated the scene of the young men entering into his mother's house, imagining their surprise to find someone inside after seeing the dark house and the empty carport. Dr. Worthington followed the emotions, as surprise turned to fear of being caught, and fear to unbridled anger. As he did this, he could begin to understand - not condone - what had happened the night his mother was killed.
"From recalling the hurt to empathizing with the offender, Dr. Worthington's mind went to a conversation he had had earlier with his siblings as they had each wished for a few hours with the murderer and the crowbar so that they could exact revenge. Contemplating his own lust for revenge, Dr. Worthington suddenly saw with keen insight the darkness in his own heart. While the youth had killed his mother in a sudden moment of rage, he had wished death on the youth with premeditation. He had enjoyed the thought of bludgeoning his mother's killer. As a Christian, this drove Dr. Worthington to ask for God's forgiveness.
"Feeling the relief of being forgiven. he was moved to not only look with new humility at the young man who had killed his mother, but also to want to extend the altruistic gift of forgiveness to him. This also happened to be the third step in the method of forgiveness he had taught others....
"In the days and months which passed, Dr. Worthington shared his commitment to forgive with others, so that when doubt inevitably came about whether forgiveness had been real, he would not doubt, but continue to hold on to the forgiveness by going back and repeating the steps as necessary....
"Others like Christian speaker Nancy Leigh DeMoss advocate that forgiveness is 'not so much a method to be taught as a truth to be lived'....Like any gift, forgiveness can bring joy to both the giver and the receiver, and the one who gives pays the highest price. But perhaps the extreme costliness of this particular gift imbues forgiveness, of all actions, with the greatest potential to image forth the divine." ( from "As We Forgive," by Catherine Claire Larson)
Faith is a lifestyle to be lived, more than it is a set of concepts that we say "Amen, Lord, yes I believe" to. Walking the Walk of following Jesus in loving God, loving neighbor, and loving one's enemy is costly - especially to our fragile ego that wants its own way in everything. Yet nothing else gives you deep inner peace and joy as much as living as Jesus lived, of dying to your own ego-driven wants, and living unselfishly for others with all your heart. The more deeply you know that God loves YOU, the more love you will find in your heart for others.
Living the Gospel message gives us humility. Humility shows us that we are as fragile and broken inside as the next person. Humility teaches us that we are as much in need of God's forgiveness as any other human being is. Humility softens our hearts so that we know from experience that Jesus is right: we will only be underdeveloped half-persons until we embrace Faith and live God's Law of Love. Once you experience the truth of this in your own life, your Faith can finally become Real.