Love is Dirty

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails…”

1 Corinthians 13:4-8

What comes to your mind when you hear the word love? What images do you think about, what things do you remember? Maybe you remember the affection and encouragement of your family when you were a kid or what it felt like to fall in love for the first time. Maybe you think about the joy that your spouse or family brings you. Regardless, when we think about love and the meaning it has in each of our lives, for most of us, it's a very pleasant emotion. One that's filled with warmth and fuzzy feelings.

But as heart warming as love is, it's also painful. Love is hard. Love often gets taken advantage of and goes unappreciated. Love makes you vulnerable and can make you feel and appear weak. Love demands sacrifice. Love is dirty.

These are things that I’ve somewhat known in the past but they are things that I’ve come to understand more completely in the past few weeks. Last Tuesday I got to help teach a kindergarten class at one of the native run schools on the rez. It was awesome! If you ever want to feel like an instant celebrity, go spend a day teaching and playing with kindergarteners. I was immediately accepted and loved, practically worshipped by them. They wanted to be in my group for each lesson, they wanted me to push their swing, they wanted to ride on my back at recess, and they wanted me to sit with them at lunch. They wanted me to go to the library, the gym, and the bathroom with them. They wanted me to sleep on the floor next to them during naptime. They could not get enough of me being there and they begged me to come back the next day. Talk about a sweet time, man I felt like a champion.

It really was a great time, but it was also bittersweet. For the vast majority of these native kids, life at home is very rough and at times a nightmare. Their parents are enslaved to alcohol and drug use to the point where they can’t function in society. They can’t get a job and if they get one they will only work until they have enough money to buy more drugs or booze. Most kids are raised by their grandparents or some other relative. It's not uncommon for them to have an immediate family member that has committed suicide. Many, possibly the majority of kids are raped or physically abused by their parents or other family members. These stories that are hidden within most teenagers are not masked with little kids. Their mind doesn’t know the fullness of what’s happening and so they freely say what they observe. It’s hard to hear a little girl talk about having to move in an overcrowded house with their grandma because her mom got evicted for constant drunkenness and not paying the rent.

What’s not told about life at home is seen as you spend time with these kids. The neglect is evident in their rotten teeth, dirty clothes, lice infested hair, and dirty faces. One girl messed her pants right before she came to school. The nurse cleaned her up but had no clean underwear for her so she had to wear the same pants without underwear for the whole day. Needless to say the classroom reeked. On top of that she constantly wanted to me to hold her on my lap. The smell was intense and I could feel how dirty my jeans were getting but knowing that this was probably the only love she would get all day made the minor discomfort a non issue. She wasn’t the only one by any means. They all wanted to be held; they all wanted the affection they so desperately lacked at home. At the end of the day I walked out to my truck smelling like little kids. My hands were gritty from the dirt on their clothes and my face oily from them pressing theirs against mine. But that’s how love feels, it’s dirty.

Loving on little kids is a rewarding love. Even though I walked away filthy, I walked away feeling appreciated, needed, and loved myself. But some times love is harder than holding dirty; smelly kids. Since I’ve been out here Joel and I have been volunteering with this small youth group on Saturday nights. These kids are in junior high and they are not the least bit well behaved. Whenever I take them somewhere they go nuts no matter how hard I try to contain them. They have no respect whatsoever for people’s property including mine, they yell out the windows at people walking by, they refuse to get in the car when it’s time to leave, they leave stuff in my truck than accuse me of stealing it, driving them home takes at least an hour sometimes two because they think it’s funny to intentionally give me wrong directions to their house, and no matter how much I’ve done for them at the end of the day they will hop out the car with no thanks at all just continued mocking. When I’m done hanging out with them I feel frustrated, annoyed, and discouraged.

This past Saturday night after the youth group I felt like I had been pushed to the limit. That night a group of five girls thought it was hilarious to try to beat me up and take my keys. They came up to me in a group and started kicking my shins; they ripped my shirt, and tried relentlessly to get my phone and keys out of my pockets. When I fought them off and they realized they weren’t getting anything from me they decided to go beat on my truck. They jumped on the roof and hood and they pounded on the sides and windows. Middle school girls are not even remote threat but watching them laugh as they tried hard yet pointlessly to inflict pain on me and then try to destroy my truck was like watching posessed little people. I was mad, how can you possibly do anything with these kids! In the past few years I've worked with teens who were in prison, teens whose parents were drug addicts, teens who have a history of horrible physical and sexual abuse and none of them acted like this! These teenagers are absolutely out of control!

As Joel and I drove home that night I vented to him in a way that was not the way a Godly man should vent and said things that I never should have said. I allowed myself to get raging mad about some of the kids and a situation we were having with the leaders of the youth group who in ways were taking advantage of us as much if not more than the kids were. I kind of expected it from the kids, but not from the leaders we’ve tried so hard to help for the past 6 weeks. I was mad at all of them, possibly justifiably so, but you know what, love is dirty. It's not easy and it's not something that you give only when it's returned. As I continued to think over the next couple days about all that had happened and as I replayed the twisted sounds of those girls laughing I remembered a story.



27Then the governor's soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. 28They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, 29and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him. "Hail, king of the Jews!" they said. 30They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again. 31After they had mocked him, they took off the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.


32As they were going out, they met a man from Cyrene, named Simon, and they forced him to carry the cross. 33They came to a place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull). 34There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it. 35When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots.[a] 36And sitting down, they kept watch over him there. 37Above his head they placed the written charge against him: THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS. 38Two robbers were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left. 39Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads 40and saying, "You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!"


41In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. 42"He saved others," they said, "but he can't save himself! He's the King of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. 43He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, 'I am the Son of God.' " 44In the same way the robbers who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him.


We want love to be pretty, we want it to make sense, and we want it to make us feel valuable. But the truth of the cross and the ultimate truth of Christ's love is that more often than not loving people is dirty business. The cross has become a beautiful symbol over the past 2,000 years that brings comfort to many, so much so that sometimes I think it's lost the horror that it originally portrayed. It is without a doubt a symbol of love, the most perfect kind of love but not necessarily the kind that we like to celebrate and practice in our lives. For Jesus, love didn't just mean warm fuzzy feelings of highschool sweethearts and playing with little children. Love meant submission and humiliation. Love meant vicious beatings, a crown of thorns, and being pierced by iron nails. Love meant hanging on a bloody cross listening to the shouts and twisted laughing of a mocking crowd and yet despite all of that crying out to God saying, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do."

When I think about how far short I fall of loving people in that way I'm humbled and ashamed that I bear the name of Christ. I am unworthy to be called one of his followers. I later found out that the reason those kids act up the way they do is because they're testing me. Everyone in their whole life has let them down and abandoned them in one way or another. I remember the first question all of them asked me was, "So when are you leaving?" They act crazy partly as a defense mechanism because they've been hurt by too many who have come before just to leave after getting close to them. I also found out that the reason they are such a pain to get in the truck to go home and the reason they send me on a wild goose chase to find their house is because home is not a happy place at all. Instead of a loving family eager to hear about their day, most of these kids go home to drugged up parents ready to take out their anger on them. The time they spend with me and with the others who volunteer on the rez is the only love they get.

If we are to make disciples of Jesus and if we are to bring about his beautiful kingdom in this cruel world, than we must learn the love of Christ. Not the, "look mom I got an A", first kiss, cute little kid, Christmas morning kind of love, but the kind of love that embraces a filthy and diseased person, the kind of love that is without condition, and the kind of love that remains after you've been hurt, after you've been rejected, after you've been mocked, after you've been nailed to a cross. That is the kind of love that transforms, that is the kind of love that will show Jesus to all who see it, and that is the kind of love that will change the world. God didn't wait for us to be clean and have it all together before He chose to love us, so let us not grow tired of showing everyone in our lives a love that is dirty.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8