Knowing we’re supposed to love the hard to love people in our lives, even knowing the theological reasons for that, is one thing. Actually seeing it in practice is something entirely different. This past Sunday as we continued in our series, Hard to Love, we took a look at a remarkable story of the kind of transformation that can take place when we let love loose into our hard to love situations. You don’t want to miss this.
Love’s Transformation
Let me start this morning with a tough question. In fact, I want you to close your eyes in order to answer this one. How would you respond if your child was murdered? That’s an emotional question, I know, so go ahead and feel that emotion for a minute. Let me show you a picture. This is a picture of Mary Johnson and her son. In 1993 Mary’s son, Laramiun Byrd, was 20 years old. One night he went to a party with some friends. As perhaps many young men are wont to do he did a little bit of fronting at the party to the benefit of his ego and his image in front of his friends. Now, this might not be such a big deal on a normal night, but this particular party was also attended by a 16-year-old young man named O’Shea Israel. O’Shea took up Laramium’s challenge and did a bit of fronting of his own. After all, he couldn’t be made to look bad in front of his own friends. Things digressed from there and the next morning Mary got a call asking if Laramiun had come home the night before. He hadn’t. Not long after some officers arrived to let her know that he had been murdered at the party. In an instant—perhaps just as you imagined—her world completely fell apart.
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The Nexus 