{"id":21434,"date":"2017-08-23T00:10:01","date_gmt":"2017-08-23T07:10:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/littlecountrychurch.org\/?p=11485"},"modified":"2017-08-23T00:10:01","modified_gmt":"2017-08-23T07:10:01","slug":"august-23-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/2017\/08\/23\/august-23-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"August 23, 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cAnd now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.\u201d<\/em> 1 Corinthians 13:13 (NIV)<\/span><\/p>\n

Love Climbs Mountains<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n

A couple of summers ago my husband and I climbed Lassen Peak for his 51st birthday. As we proceeded up the mountain, the above Scripture came to my mind. It started with faith: I had made it to the top before (albeit 15 years earlier) and so I had faith that I could do it again. Then came hope\u2014not the expectation of good, or confidence in salvation, that this verse talks about, but I hoped (please Lord help me!) I could make it all the way. About one mile from the top, love was the only reason I kept going. We were totally unprepared for how cold it was. I had left a nice warm hoody in the truck and the closer we got to the top the more I thought about that hoody. I didn\u2019t need to master Lassen, I already had, but this was what my husband wanted to do for his birthday and I wasn\u2019t about to let him down.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a full moon night hike, and as we got to the top and expectantly waited for the moon to come out, we noticed the ever deepening cloud cover, the wind blowing, and the snow still on the ground around us. On the climb back down we briefly saw the moon. It was not exactly what we had hoped for, and of course the next night was crystal clear and the moon shone brightly. We wanted to be up there to see it like that, but didn\u2019t want it enough to climb it again.<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, that night, the greatest of these truly was love\u2014otherwise, I would have turned around and gone back down the mountain to my warm hoody in the truck. I might have been a little disappointed in myself, but I would have gotten over it quickly! But my love for my husband was bigger than my thoughts of comfort or my feelings of exhaustion. And once we made it to the top it was exhilarating, if not slightly hypothermic!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLord, thank You for helping us to climb mountains (figuratively and literally). Most of all, thank You for going to the cross to show us what love really looks like, so when we place our faith in You, we can have true hope (the joyful and confident expectation of eternal salvation). As You have shown us, love truly is the greatest of these. May we walk in love in our daily lives. Amen.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAnd now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.\u201d 1 Corinthians 13:13 (NIV) […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p92wjD-5zI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lccredding.org\/church\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}