Hey, hey, hey, all you beautiful people. Today I wanna talk to you about love in a day of name-calling, insults, labels, and slander. We're in a day and time when our political climate has escalated into exactly that, and there's no sweet way to put it. You can put ice cream on top of a manure pile, but it does the manure no good and it sure ruins the ice cream. Jesus promised his disciples one big challenge in life: love your enemies. Three words. Those words are offered to us to change us, not our enemies. Søren Kierkegaard said, "Once you label me, you negate me." And I wanna talk about being shadow-locked—when we look away from the human and look at the shadow, when we see a shadow and not a person. We're created for eye contact. Slow yourself down and look into the reality of what's casting the shadow. I learned as a father that as we speak, our children will speak. As leaders lead, followers follow. And right now we've got powerful people calling other people sleazebags and dirtbags in Senate hearings. Leaders, love people or get out of the way so some kind of lover can lead without insulting and slandering people. Lovers lead, leaders love. Love is the heavy lifting of the human condition. It's not perfection—you're not gonna do it in perfect ways every time—but you can progress and make a process of loving as you go forward. So come join me in a love revolution. To love our enemies, to love our neighbors, to love the least of these. Walk away from being shadow-locked. Look into the countenance, the eyes of somebody who is starving for love, and say those three magical, holy, marvelous, startling, unsettling words: "I love you." It's really, really hard to label somebody who just looked you in the eyes with sincerity and authenticity and said, "I love you." Oh, come on, people. Let's do something beautiful. Ugly is being done to death. Let's be the movement and the revolution of love. Hear me when I say to you, whoever you are, whatever you're doing while you're listening: Oh, baby girl, baby boy, I love you.
