Long Distance Love

I’ve known people throughout my life who were involved in long-distance relationships and saw the person they “loved” very infrequently. I never understood how you can love someone you’re never around. I better understand the desire for long-distance love now that I live with someone.

I have a ministry that is supposed to be a ministry of Christian love. For most of my adult religious life, my ministry has been something I’ve done from a distance: writing posts for my blog, posting videos on my YouTube channel, video chatting with people from other countries, and helping people as much as possible without actually having to be around them. This was my version of the song from Phil Collins and Philip Bailey, "Easy Lover."

Long-distance love is easy because you don’t have to be around the person and deal with their imperfections and the things they do that rub you the wrong way. You don’t have to compromise your selfishness except for the few intermittent times you are in the person’s presence. Likewise, long-distance ministry is easy because you don’t have to be among the sheep.

It’s been a year and three months since I moved in with my housemate and closest friend, Brian. We got along very well when we didn’t live together and still do most of the time. I saw very few flaws in him, and I’d like to think that he saw very few flaws in me. It was easy friendship. Now that we live together, real friendship has the opportunity to develop if we choose to let it. But it requires compromise, sacrifice, and selflessness—things that our broken human nature and society discourage.

Real love is bending, compromising, and accepting flaws in the other and hoping for the same. It is washing the dish the other left in the sink, putting up with petty attitudes,, and accepting that people’s faith sometimes ebbs and flows. This is real love. This is real ministry.

Human-written, AI spell-checked 3/27/21 AD

Image from X(Twitter)