Idealistic people cannot be relational people.
Relational people will not be idealistic.
Relationships are the sole substance of the Kingdom of God on earth and they must exist in reality, not in ideals imposed upon reality.
What a relief then it should be for the religious person to be freed from their religion which is based in ideology and then welcomed into the Kingdom of God which is our reality. What joy because not only is this reality a freedom for the soul but it is in fact a tangible experience with the divine which we can cry and eat and pray and dance and fight and live with made of the very real, raw, and often messy people we are surrounded by daily.
If my energies can be spent searching for a way to love a person in their current status rather than needlessly attempting to bring them into a more "ideal" state (which is likely to be neither beneficial nor required for true Kingdom life) how much greater trust will I then be challenged to develop in the source of that Love, my Creator, to use my efforts to show love in a way specific to each individual as a catalyst for a true Love revelation which then can change a life? This trust and attention to unconditionally loving the individual is both more fulfilling and more successful than the religious approach of trying to change a person first in the hope that it will then produce a revelation of Love.
"Love one another as I have loved you" was Jesus' commandment to us. The ONLY one really. And in this one directive we are afforded the freedom to BE as we are instead of fighting the hopeless battle to conform to religious ideologies. Love is as different as the people who share it and as individual as the person who is blessed to receive it. If then we are only called to love and everything else is subject to this one thing then we must accept the divinely creative individuality of the people who make up the Kingdom of God instead expecting that the Kingdom somehow standardizes the individual into a specific type of being with a limited set of traits.
It's freeing and challenging and hopeful and overwhelming all at the same time and I am SO grateful that God designed me from conception to play my own role in His Kingdom instead of requiring that I fit a mold made to stifle individuality at the moment I chose to follow Him.
"Sameness is yucky" said someone this morning while we were talking about this very thing and I couldn't agree more. A moment's consideration for the complexity to which God has designed us as individuals (DNA) or even a brief look at how many variation there are to any one single species in nature (how many kinds of roses are there?) and I think you'll see that God agrees.
