Let Love Guide Us in the New Year: Reciprocity

Honeysuckle symbolizes the bonds of love.

Jesus’ commandment to love one another carries with it the expectation that his disciples will show reciprocity toward each other when feeling and expressing love for each other. They will help each other by behaving in the same way or by giving each other similar advantages. Regrettably this may not always happen.

 
Some Christians will feel and express love for their fellow Christians more easily than others. This lack of reciprocity, however, should not keep us from loving our brothers and sisters in Christ.

 
Mutually loving each other, loving each other in the same way, while it is highly desirable, may prove difficult to achieve. Different people have different capacities for giving and receiving love.

 
As Christians we are expected to grow in our ability to love each other, but for some of us it may be harder to do than for others. We all have different experiences, and these experiences can affect our ability to give and receive love.

 
The important thing is that each of us works toward loving our brothers and sisters in Christ more.
On the other hand, our love for our fellow human beings may be one-sided. They may be entirely unresponsive to our love for them. Whatever may be their response, we love them anyway.

 
Loving our neighbor and loving our enemy do not carry with them the expectation that our neighbor and our enemy will love us back. “We love because God loves us,” wrote the apostle John.
How do we love one another? How do we love others?

 
Some of the ways that we love one another, and we love others is that we are patient with them. We are friendly, generous, helpful, and caring about them. We give thought to their feelings. We try to understand their feelings and to put ourselves in their place.

 
We are sympathetic toward them, and we offer them encouragement and support. We compliment and praise them. We have a kind word for them. We are honest and truthful with them, and we don’t try to deceive them. We look for the strengths and good qualities in them.

 
We don’t intentionally try to harm them. We don’t deliberately cause them embarrassment or make trouble for them. We treat them with kindness and care. We give them the benefit of the doubt and we trust them.

 
We go out of our way for them. We forgive them and we don’t hold anything against them. When we do something bad to them, we make it up to them if we can.

 
We keep open channels of communication with them. We listen to them. We mend broken fences with them whenever possible.

 
You may think of other ways that we as Christians show love or one another and show love for others.