Unfeigned Love...

UNFEIGNED LOVE...
In the small town of Portopalo di Capo Passero on the southeastern tip of Sicily, I encountered something I never expected to encounter. I had met dozens and dozens of people during my journey around the Mediterranean, but the person that God lead me to in Portopalo was different and interacting with him and being part of his world for a few days has changed my life.
  
I arrived late in the evening on a transit bus to the little village called Portopalo (it really was a village...~3000 people). I did not really know what to expect upon arriving. I had been in communication with a young guy on Couchsurfing who told me that I could come and stay at his place for a couple days before heading to Malta. Usually the people on CS are nice and generous people (otherwise why would they go through the trouble of everything involved in hosting). I had CSed several other times around the Med and they all had been good experiences....some better than others depending on what the host was willing to provide for sleeping arrangements, location, etc. One time I stayed on the floor of a mechanic's garage for 5 days in Thessaloniki with open windows, no fan, no A/C, or anything...it was hot, sticky, smelled like grease, and just like everyone else, mosquitoes like a free meal (since the window screens had massive holes and rips in them).  :/
 
Well, when I got off the bus, I slowly made my way to the person's house (dragging my bad leg carefully). I had some difficulty finding his place because the streets are not so well marked and the house numbering convention was not exactly consistent. I tried to talk to several people in the town but apparently English is not so common in the rural parts of Sicily. So I tried to get by with my minimal Italian. I at least got across who I was looking for, the address, and that I was lost. However, it seems the 5 people I spoke to did not even know that the address I was looking for was 1 block down the street (as I came to find out myself by wandering around for awhile). Maybe they did not understand exactly what I was asking or maybe they just didn't know the postal addresses in the area very well. However, it has been my experience that the general public (insofar as the places I have been) often quickly default to the answer “I don't know” without much thought. Possibly a crazy, beat-up looking, injured, American tourist with a huge backpack spatting out fairly unintelligible Italian sends a certain message and that they would rather simply be about their own business and not bother with me. But, this is only my one-sided perspective of the matter and is nothing more than a opinionated perspective of a disgruntled tourist trying desperately to get places.
 
So, when I finally found the person's place, the unexpected experience began and from the moment I met him, I knew there was something completely different about him. It was not a specific gesture, or mannerism, or cordiality in speech. It was not that he was super nice, or offered me his summer cottage to stay in, or helped me find my way around. I guess the closest I can describe the uniqueness of who he was is to say that he was different in character, attitude, and outlook. I can't reiterate all the conversations we had, but if I can just describe a few of the more meaningful encounters and the words we exchanged, possibly you might see why I saw a difference in this man.
 
His name is Corrado (but he goes by Charlie) and he is a computer engineer and a passionate musician (keys and voice). We connected immediately through science and music, but it seemed that our connection ran deeper right from the start. On our drive to his cottage, we talked about our current life situations and what is going on with each other and where we are going in the future (Charlie speaks fairly good English so we could converse quite well). Facing several cross-roads in his life with a long distance relationship, desiring to pursue a musical career but not finding stable employment in that field, and dealing with severe health issues with his mother, Charlie had been carrying some heavy burdens around for awhile.
  
I empathized with him and I conveyed some of the troubles I had been facing, the uncertainties in my future, the relational problems in my life that had left me scarred, and some of the unanswered questions that I have been dragging around with me for some time. I expressed that I had found solace in trying not to figure it all out on my own but in believing that God was playing an active part in helping me know the right choice to make and the right path to take. It was at this point that he asked me if I was a Christian. I told him that I absolutely believed in Jesus and that he was my personal Savior. He told me he was too but he was not the typical "church-going Christian", "Christian-by-name", type of Christian.
  
Our conversation turned, at this point, when Charlie explained that so many of his friends (and basically all the people he knows) say they are Christian - they go to church and they say they love people - but their love for their neighbor is not pure love. As he calls it, “They have false love...they are double faced.” He explained that all the people he knows say they love but they really do not love. Either they are nice until it is inconvenient for them, or they are kind until they feel they are deviating from the accepted practices of their community, or they give generously unless it is to someone who has a different point of view or they disagree with, or they act benevolent until they are pressured to conform to their peers, etc. Whatever it is, Charlie claimed that most people who say they are showing love are just being “loving” for a time and that their “love” (if it really is love) vanishes quickly and thus proves to show that there was never real love to begin with. It was “convenient love” not “pure love”.
 
I got to share a scripture that I remembered about this topic with him and told him that I understood exactly what he meant. I had experienced it before as well and continue to encounter with people I meet in life, in my friends, and in myself.
 
1 Peter 1:22 NRSV
Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.
  
As selfish creatures by nature, people reserve the best for themselves. Moreover, people don't just reserve the best, they typically reserve as much as they can for themselves. This is a universal tendency and is an unavoidable by-product of the striving to gain more, live better, and out-do others worldliness we are inculcated with day in and day out. This is part of the sickness of this world that we are all infected with. I spoke to Charlie about hypocrisy and people saying one thing and doing another. As I explained to him, the problem really comes down to 2 issues: 1) by nature, people do not want to show true love, and 2) people who say they show true love fall short of actually demonstrating the reality of what it means to love (whether intentionally or unintentionally).
 
Even people who have good intentions and are genuinely interested in showing true love, sometimes are lead astray or deceived into showing a sort of pseudo-love. This pseudo-love is hard to distinguish because it satisfies a person's desire to show another person love, like they are supposed to, but it fails to be real love because it lacks one of several critical ingredients. The most common absent ingredient is that of impartiality. Too often a person chooses to show love to someone they trust and they know are “worthy” of their love. This usually manifests itself in showing love to people in your social circles, at your church (but, of course, you hesitate for someone from another church), to people who can reciprocate the love, or to people who you feel comfortable loving. This act of pseudo-loving has all the right marks and makes people feel good but it fails to be what love really means.

Romans 12:9 HCS
Love must be without hypocrisy....
 
There is a song by J.J. Heller about love that has challenged me to rethink the meaning of love and if I give people pure love. Do I love because I am loved? Or do I love because of what it means for me or what I can get out of it, or what other people may think of me if I don't. Or do I love them because they deserve to be loved. The chorus goes:
 
Who will love me for me
Not for what I have done
Or what I will become
Who will love me for me
'Cause nobody has shown me what love
What love really means 
 
Charlie had nothing to gain from showing me love. He knew that I believed in God and I loved Jesus but that was not why he loved me. From sharing his music, meals with his family, his cottage, driving me around, sharing his deepest thoughts and feelings, helping me find the ferry and make arrangement for my next destination, and never asking a thing from me, I saw that Charlie was the “real McCoy”. I had never met someone who just oozed love like this. It was not his actions or disposition or temperament about the whole matter, it was his heart. I saw that his heart was truly genuine. I saw something in him that was so rare I did not want to leave. 

Some people are good people and they try to love with a pure heart, unconditionally, and without recompense, but people tend to fall prey all to easily to the tricks of the adversary. Subtle voices creep in people's heads: “Why should I help this person out, I don't know them?” Or “Why help this person? They don't go to our church. Or they are probably an unbeliever. Let someone else help them.” Or “I love people! What are you talking about? I am the nicest guy. I smile and say hi to everyone.” But perhaps the most deceiving is, "I love people as long as they are nice to me or go along with my likings or are willing to listen to me and follow my instructions or who fit my predefined checklist for okay fellows to associate with." Whatever reason we might entertain, we tend to find a reason anyway in the end. It takes a heart with conviction to love without stumbling over our own sinful inclinations to make excuses.
 
While all of these scenarios might not be wholly wrong, the distinction is not so easy to make regarding whether a person is choosing not to love. The only person who can discriminate between false love, pseudo-love, and pure love is the Almighty God. He looks on people's hearts. He knows if you are giving out of a pure heart, if you are giving without thinking about yourself, if you are giving even when you have nothing to gain, if you are giving and don't mind being put-out because of it, or he knows if you are giving under the pretense of an ulterior motive or want something for yourself instead.
 
I could speak for days about Charlie and the lessons he taught me and the love he showed me. I know that I only gave a cursory version of the unfeigned love I encountered in Portopalo and how it affected me. I realized during my time with Charlie that I was suffering from some of the same false pretensions about love that we talked about. I came to understand through a conviction in my soul that I often have called pseudo-love pure love and that I had failed on many accounts to love deeply from my heart. I came see where I was complacent in my heart for what it means to love and it saddened me that I had not been stronger or was more aware in those times.
  
I know that I will never be able to love perfectly. No person can ever accomplish perfection in this life, but to be aware of my own short-comings is the first step in being able to advance one step closer toward doing it right...doing it the way Jesus did it. He showed us how to really love people but his example challenges us to reach beyond ourselves, beyond what we are comfortable with, beyond the conventions of the crowd. 
 
At the end of my stay, I was able to pray over Charlie's mother and his family and minister to them and to speak blessings over their lives and to encourage them to continue in the word of the Lord as they have been doing so diligently. Portopalo will be a place that I will never forget. This small town in the corner of Sicily was where I saw clearer than ever true love exhibited. It was a surprise in my soul and a time of growth for me to evaluate myself and see where I needed to focus in my life. I determined that I wanted to love wider, love greater, and love deeper than I ever have. Charlie showed me that complacency is the great enemy and false confidences within myself about what it means to truly love have blinded me to seeing that I was suffering from the same problem that plagues so many other people. He admitted his failures too but to realize the failure is the first step to turning back and going a different way. And so my endless journey continues in order to try to love like my Savior loved...a love so great I am in awe of how it is even possible. 
 
In closing, 1 Corinthians 13 is the best description of what true love looks like but one rarely hears people discussing how hard it is to actually love in that way. When it comes down to it, we all can love in part, but it takes more than what we have in ourselves to love in whole. We must let the spirit of the Lord strengthen us so that we can live beyond ourselves, so that we can love with a pure heart, unfeigned, without hypocrisy.
  
“Lord, help us to love like you love. We know we are not capable of showing love without your help, and it is only because you love us that we can truly love another. Fill us with your love and let your love flow through us like a river flows into the sea.”