love is improvising

Last week someone was talking about the importance of "getting into the messiness of each other's lives". I'm not sure I know what that means. How do we know when to pry a little more than usual, when to ask "how are you" in that truly interested way? If there isn't any conflict do we need to go out of our way to find some?

This week I've been thinking about the uniqueness and the individuality of each one of my relationships. There is very little room for blanket statements like "they all think this about me" or "this group perceives me as such and such" because in reality each individual has a different perception of me due to the uniqueness of the relationships. I think that maybe loving one another and understanding messiness means responding to individuals.

I think that living in the present is really the response to "how" to love people well. If I'm stressing out about how I'm going to "get into people's messiness" and "how I'm going to love the community" I'm going to loose sight of the spontaneous and improvised nature of life and relationships. We don't know and that's the beauty of it. We study Christ to learn how he did it, we study others to learn how they feel loved and then we improvise in our present "here and now" experience.