This is love: we lay down our lives for our friends

From my perspective,
Jesus said the highest practice of,
how we are IN and we Share 

Real Love:

We Lay Down our Lives for our Friends...
and for God, for ourselves, and for the well-being and coming-to-fruition of All our Relations...

We lay down our lives.

We lay down our ego, our habits, and our identifications.
We lay down all of God's promises and blessings.
We lay down all the ways we want to impress people, and be a success.

We lay down our lives.

We lay down everything we rationally believe. 
We lay down everything that makes us, us - in our own concept of ourselves.
We lay down our understanding of ourselves, of this world, of God, and of what we think God wants for us.

We lay down our lives.

We lay down our health and our illness, our wealth and our poverty, our wisdom and our folly, our worth and our worthlessness, our rightness and our humility.
We lay down our relationships - our loves and our hates.
We lay down how we wish the world was, how we think things should be, and the difference we want to make.

We lay down our lives.
Everything past, present and future - on and on I could list it all - we are called to lay it Down...

We lay down our lives.

And from here:

• we can more and more see what The Progenitor (Father) is Doing spiritually (in Heaven) - and we can begin to DO that on Earth.
• we can more and more hear what The Progenitor is Saying spiritually (in Heaven) - and we can begin to Say that here on Earth.

(All this, just as Jesus did... but, in our own unique way, with our own unique call)

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And from here,
sooner or later...

we run cross-ways to the powers and principalities of this World, 

This is always the way.The Progenitor does not bow-to to the petty beliefs and limits of the 'Authorities', the rule-makers and enforcers
- whether they be Religious, Political, Martial, Economic, Cultural, Familial, etc.

Matter of fact, Jesus seems to be doing an inordinate amount of healing On the Sabbath; 
neener-neener to religious sensibilities.

And like Jesus, eventually, as we do as God calls us to do, 
we also end up doing/ being the unpopular, unacceptable, unsuccessful, verboten...

And, like Jesus, we take the consequences - both the enjoyable ones, and those that are not.
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And from here, we keep going, until we go round again...

When we follow Jesus, we pick up our cross.
We die daily - on a soul level.

And (praise God) we also rise (on a soul level) in the Glory of God,

to love and serve God and our neighbor
...There is no end to this practice.

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This is love:
we lay down our lives for our friends.

It took me a long time to realize:

• it doesn't mean to please my friends, be nice to my friends, do what my friends want me to do.
• it doesn't mean to be a happy-little-martyr, putting up with BS, letting people treat me like a doormat.
• it doesn't mean to try to save them from themselves, from their lessons, from the pain of their challenges or from the pain of their Glory.

Laying down our lives for our friends;
Means:
- Dying to flesh - to our physically-focused self; and
- Rising in spirit - to our spiritually-focused self; and
- Being constantly born again into:

• I AM Love - fed and led Directly by God, more and more, in who we Be and what we Do
• the Way, Truth, Light, Life, Love... which shines through us more and more clearly into the world
• beholding and reflecting as a mirror the Glory of God, more and more into this world, from Glory to Glory...

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Our friends may like this, or they may not.
Our friends may judge and resist this, or they may not.
Our friends may recognize and support us, or they may not.

It doesn't matter whether our friends experience this as Love!
- As we BE and DO Love - they are blessed.
- As we follow the Living God in each step, and become who we Really Are in God - they are blessed.
- As the world shifts, and more and more of us come to our maturity spiritually - they are blessed.

Our friends:
our intimates, our play-friends, our families, our co-workers, our church-friends, our neighbors...
may not recognize Love when they see it, or enjoy it when they experience it.
might think we are crazy, or mean, or (OMG! ;) inappropriate.

And you know what, we can become ok with that.
Fortunately, we are getting into the habit of dying-daily
- so we can get unstuck from needing-to, having-to please them, to live-into their expectations...

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And, of course we do not have to do any of this!
We have a choice.

We can follow The Progenitor
or not.

We can live as Jesus lived, in our own unique way,
or not.

We can engage our unique Process of Soul Maturity, Teleios,
or not. 

We can do any other thing, follow any other way, and miss the mark, or not.
We can follow the World, the Flesh, the Devil... or not.

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We have a choice:

• We can follow Spirit and Actually Love our Neighbor, truly, deeply, spiritually.

OR

• We can have a shadow of Love, a pretense of Love, a striving to Love; a purely human, limited kind of love.

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It may seem strange, but culturally we are not clear about what Love is, spiritually.
We don't always rationally or emotionally or relationally grok Love.
That's ok, spirit is not flesh, and the carnal cannot Know God.

But spiritually, as we lay down our lives, we start to expereince the wild ride of Love.
And no one and nothing will ever be the same, again.
Jesus did this, let us follow his lead.

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this post has a similar theme, if interested: When we Follow God: Everything Must Go!

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BTW this post is my response, to this useful post by Michael Green: 
How Orthodoxy Wages War Against Orthopraxy (And Causes Us All To Miss The Point) 

Personally,

I do not care at all about orthodoxy, or about 'right' rational beliefs

... Except how they affect things that matter spiritually,
i.e. our Practice and Experience of:

• the Presence and Love of God,
• the Reign-Kingdom of Heaven,
• our direct communication and relationship... healing, filling, maturing, dancing, co-creating with the Living God.

I'm not a fan of "attaching" to doing-thinking anything 'Right',

rather

• going in a direction that is useful to catch the scent of the direct, present-time leading of of the Living God, and
• walking in the way I am led, best I can.

>>>

With this in mind 

From my perspective

love, laying down our lives, dancing with the Divine in our soul and into the world - in real-time...

leaves right-belief in the dust.

My perspective is 

our calling to love may look different than we humanly think believe, feel, usually see modeled. 

our calling to lay down our lives for our friends, 

includes laying everything down,

including our ego, beliefs, religion...

and doing/saying as we perceive the Divine doing/saying 

- I would call this doing the will of God, bringing heaven to earth 

- the CORE of the Lord's Prayer, IMO. 

This is love, the way of Jesus, from my perspective 

way beyond being nice, following rules, or any traditional ideas of orthodoxy

thanks for playing! 

your feedback appreciated 

: ) Wendy

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