Chemistry Lesson

Romans 12:9–21

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• Let love be genuine
• Hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good
• Bless those who persecute you
• Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good

Applying the Word to My Life:
When I was in college I took organic chemistry. A lot of people survive that class by memorizing — they build enormous flash card decks covering every possible reaction. I knew that wasn't going to work for me, but I also had to get a good grade in that class. That meant I just did every problem in the book. If we had five of ten problems assigned, I did all ten. By the time tests came around, my friends were huddled together going through their cards. I was just sitting there waiting to go in. The difference wasn't that I had memorized more. It was that I had stopped trying to memorize and started trying to understand how things fit together.

I think about that when I read today's passage. It is, on its face, a list. Love genuinely. Hate what is evil. Hold to what is good. Bless those who persecute you. Do not repay evil for evil.

It is possible to memorize every item on it. It is even possible to do every item on it and still not really love.

This reading isn't another list for us to carry around with us. Paul knows this. That is why the first item is different than all the rest. It begins with the foundation for everything that follows: let love be genuine. The word in the Greek is anypokritos — literally without a mask, without a performance. Everything after it is what genuine love looks like in practice. But if the love is not there, the list becomes exactly what my friends were doing before the test — going through the motions of something they had not actually learned.

You can perform every item on this list. What you cannot perform is the love underneath it.

Growing up in a small Nebraska town, I was pretty sheltered from anyone who was different from me. I didn't have much experience with people from outside of my own experiences. When I was asked to work with someone whose needs were outside anything I had dealt with before, my honest reaction was discomfort. I didn't know what that person needed from me. I wasn't confident I could give it. And I had no idea how to do it well.

That hesitancy doesn't really work for a catechist. I love sharing with my students and I always say that I will teach anyone who shows up in the room — no matter who they are or what their background is. If they enter into my life, I will give them all I know how to give.

That means I have been asked to step in with students who have very different lived experiences from my own. Each time my instinct has been to quietly back away and let someone who "actually knows" what they are doing step up. But over and over again, the parents and support group around that student have encouraged me to just show up and "do what I do." And that's what I've done.

But what I came away with wasn't what I was expecting — it wasn't a lesson about how to help a specific student. It was a lesson about myself. The thing holding me back wasn't the situation at all. It was my own fear — of inadequacy, of getting it wrong. Once I faced that, there was nothing in the way and the Holy Spirit could flow.

This is what Paul's list is actually for. Not to be memorized. Not to be performed. Just read through it and notice where things get hard — where an instruction meets resistance rather than recognition. That resistance is information.

The person who is hardest for you to love is not an inconvenience. They are a teacher.

They are showing you the thing inside you — the pride, the old wound, the fear — that still needs to be offered up. Part of the living sacrifice from yesterday's reading is the parts of ourselves we are still holding back. The fear of inadequacy that kept me from stepping toward those students was mine to give up. Not theirs to work around.

I'm still working on this — I still feel that hesitancy when asked to extend myself. When we find ourselves called to love and it feels like a performance, we are not failing. We are learning where the work still needs to happen. The gap between performing love and genuinely loving is not a permanent condition. It is a growing edge. And finding it is not cause for discouragement.

It is cause for honesty — and the next step forward.

My Response for Today:
Today I will name one person I find it hard to love — and ask what that difficulty is telling me about myself.