You’ve probably seen the commercial for Staples where there is this easy button and suddenly everything just works out once you push it. I have a coworker who revels in the opportunity to let people know that there is no easy button for the software package that we are training people to use. Technical problems sunk our senior ministry this Sunday in the third service, and it threw me into a tailspin of confusion. I forgot words to songs that I’d been singing for years and things just went worse from there. For that reason, it seemed like we struggled through that last service. Add to that the fact that we were suffering in 90 degree temperatures out here in Southern Calif. and you have the recipe for a difficult afternoon. Yet, I was still greeted afterward with a grateful bundle of smiles this afternoon from our seniors; Although my own personal ability to minister was derailed to a certain extent. Oftentimes, this ministry is just plain hard work.

My son started coming along with us to do this from the beginning and he was about four or five years old. Now, at the age of eleven and entering into the hardest years of his life, he actually gets community service credit for his work in our minstry, but it doesn’t put any blinders on the fact that it takes a lot of commitment to keep doing it. Today, he missed several fun opportunities because of our ministry and when he was upset over it, we had to explain that that is often the cost of commitment.

I believe that love and commitment are intertwined with one another. On the one hand, there are times when we struggle to move forward with love or we struggle to meet even the minimum requirements of what should be met, but we push forward in spite of the fact that these commitments are difficult. In pushing forward, we don’t always feel or even think that we are doing so out of love, but that’s where real love lives. Committed love means that we keep trying even when we don’t feel like it.

In marriage, there are often days when we feel we can’t go on, but we push past those hard times to find that we can find it in our hearts once again on another day. Our emotions can often drive our feelings and we tend to think that there is no hope, but when we finally push past the hard times, we find things are better on the other side. Sometimes, we even find the purpose in them.

In the Old Testament, God got together with Abraham and made a commitment. In doing so, a relationship of mutual love was born and grew to encompass an entire people. In the New Testament, Jesus made a new commitment of love–a commitment that showed the depth of real love and real commitment ending in the giving of his own life for all the world. Not being God, we can’t know what the big picture is, but we have to move forward and commit ourselves to the course that we are on.

There is no easy button in life and no shortcuts and if we aren’t committing ourselves to love, we are committing ourselves to something second rate and far less worthy. As Robert Frost said, “I took the road less travelled by, and it has made all the difference.” That means that we keep showing love, even when it isn’t comfortable or easy. It means we keep striving to be light even when we have darkness pouring out of own hearts.