Human community, human Jesus

“Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

Like most children raised by Christian parents in the South, I learned that song before I learned to sing my ABCs. It’s true that the Bible tells us that Jesus loves us, but it wasn’t from the Bible that I first learned about that love. Instead, it was from the people who taught me to sing the song, who told me Bible stories before I could read them, and who did the best they could to love me well.

I didn’t—and most people don’t—first experience God’s love through reading a book or singing a song about reading a book. My earliest awareness of God’s love came through the love of other people, mainly my family and the members of the First Baptist Church of Conley, Georgia. What was earliest remains truest: I know that Jesus loves me because people who follow him and try to be like him love me. Human love can be a sacrament, an incarnation, of divine love.