love is inconvenient

You know that look you give when someone asks you to do something for them and you don't want
to do it? 

We get that look when we ask our kids to clean the playroom up. 

And before I point my fingers at them, I give it often too.

Other people are inconvenient. 

Often love is quite inconvenient. 

Frederick Buechner wrote in a book about a time he was about to have a nice dinner with his parents when a friend called who was in a sudden serious emotional catastrophe.  He asked Frederick if he would come to be with him before his plane left.  Frederick was annoyed, but tried to hide it.  He really didn't want to go and, though it turned out that eventually he didn't need to go, Frederick realized how reluctant he often was to reach out to others when it didn't suit him.  Through this he came to the following conclusion:

"The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and bidding peace that passeth all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of the battle.  To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake--even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death--that little by little we start to come alive.  It was not a conclusion that I came to in time.  It was a conclusion from beyond time that came to me.  God knows I have never been any good at following the road it pointed me to, but at least, by grace, I glimpsed the road and saw that it is the only one worth traveling."
-Frederick Buechner, Sacred Journey 107