Glide

Love in Action

Last week, I wrote about mushrooms. Just after posting that story, I was flipping through 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey (highly recommend) and landed on the difference between reactive and proactive people and how it pertains to love.

Reactive people make [love] a feeling. … Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do. … Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured.

I had never consciously thought about love this way before. Love as a value. As a verb.

And that made me realize that Bill, in my story above, experienced my cooking as an act of love for him. He ate the mushrooms as an act of love in return. I never noticed he didn’t like mushrooms. What I did notice is that he ate everything I put in front of him without complaint or critique. Love as a value. Love as a verb.

The next day, I happened to go to Glide Memorial Church in the heart of the Tenderloin district in San Francisco.

San Francisco gets a lot of hate these days. Especially from people who don’t live here.

It’s an incredible city filled with breathtaking beauty. And yes, it has its problems. Every city does. So does every town, every state, every country. Poverty is real. Exceedingly so in the Tenderloin.

Glide has been doing something about it for 60 years. They offer numerous programs and services to any and everyone - including being the only organization in the city to serve 3 hot meals a day, every day.

From the moment I walked in, I felt at home. The joy was palpable and emanated from everywhere. The love was raucous, unabashed and totally infectious. Notebooks and pens were handed out to all because ‘telling your story’ is one of their values. I knew I’d found my people - a passionate community steered by love and justice in service to something bigger than themselves.

Guess what they call their work? “Love in Action”. 

Love as a value. Love as a verb.

What a gift.