Carol's Corner

Have you ever had someone give you a recipe and deliberately or by accident not written the ingredients just right? I grabbed a recipe from my mom’s recipe box, which I inherited after she died. I knew she made delicious tea biscuits and I found her recipe. But as I assembled the ingredients I realized she had incorrectly copied the recipe and forgot to put how much baking powder to use. She made the recipe from memory, never realizing the mistake. No baking powder did not make good biscuits.

In Colossians 3 the chapter is titled Rules for Christian Living – but they are great rules for living for all of us.
They help us function together, help us manage life and give us instructions for how to treat other people so we can truly include others.

Jesus summed up the ten commandments by saying the first great commandment is to Love God with all our hearts and minds and souls and the second one is to love your neighbour as yourself. Love God first and then wecan love others.
How to do this is written in the Epistles – from Corinthians to James. Instructions say to encourage one another, be kind to one another, forgive one another as a few. I like to think of these as the One Anothers.

What should these look like in our lives? How can we possibly do these to and for each other? I believe we can only do them with God’s help. We are an imperfect people living in a broken world. But oh how wonderful if everyone would treat each other with love, kindness, gentleness and would forgive each other, build each other up instead of tearing people down and care enough to comfort each other. It would help ease the struggle of trying to put together the puzzle pieces of our lives.

In the next few blog posts we will look, in more detail at some of the one anothers.

Have you experienced compassion from someone? Have you been able to offer it to another person? What did it look like? How did it make you feel?