Free-Runner-Love

Last week, I got a new family. It was only temporary – just for a week – but it was about thirty people big, so I suppose that makes up for it a bit. I was on a thing called a Falcon Camp, which is an amazing invention: basically, a bunch of Christians get together and give a week of their time (or give money or prayer) to run a holiday for kids who maybe wouldn’t get one otherwise – mainly because they’re from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I love Falcon Camp. I love Falcon Camp because while there are various trips and activities and things, fundamentally what you are doing all week is trying to love people. I suppose that’s something I like about following Jesus as well, but on Falcon it’s somehow more condensed, certainly more intense. On Falcon you don’t really expect the kids to return much of your kindness – although it’s beautiful when they do – and you know that you are there entirely for their sake and not your own.

This leads you to go to lengths of love that wouldn’t normally occur to you. For instance, Rachael spent half an hour every evening dressed up in an overcoat, a fake moustache, comedy glasses and a bald cap so cheap and rubbish that it was pretty much just a misshapen condom, playing silly games and talking in a West Country accent in the hope of providing some evening entertainment! My Dad ‘fell’ into the swimming pool fully clothed on the last night because he thought it might be funny. My mate Julie spent about two days patiently combing knits out of the girls’ hair. My mate Elly went through most of an evening sitting and listening and comforting each of the girls in her dorm as they cried for various different reasons. But to be fair, it’s not all about the impressive stuff. I was on the coach with the kids when they went home, and one girl was crying about how amazing camp was and how sad she was to leave, and she explained to me through her tears that my brother was so lovely and so kind, and how he had just sat with her in the lounge one time and he had just listened to her – he had just listened to her – and no one ever listened to her like that. And that made me want to cry too.

My other favourite thing about Falcon is that we get to tell these kids that God is crazy about them, and he’d do anything for them; and we get to back that up with everything we say and do, every minute of the day. I like that a lot. It’s show and tell really – and that’s the way it should be. My other favourite moment on the coach was when a girl showed me the ‘Father’s Love Letter’ that we’d offered them to take away – a little collection of bible verses about the way God feels about them (www.fathersloveletter.com) – and told me she’d already read it five times, and she loves it, because she doesn’t even have a father but now she does.

And finally I love Falcon because it changes me. In fact, it makes me more free. Not free in the Western, couch-potato sense, or even the trippy, hippy sort of sense, but in the sense of a free runner. Because this thought occurred to me last night: in what way are free runners ‘free’? In that they can overcome any obstacle. They have trained – they have sought out the toughest challenges and gone through the hard work and the pain of practice – and now they are strong, and they are fearless. They are free in the sense that they are unstoppable. The idea of free running is that you run straight in one direction regardless of what’s in the way, and nothing can hold you back.

I want to love like a free runner. I want to have the sort of love that Jesus had – the sort of love that will not stop, that will not be put off by its beloved being unpleasant or unlovable. A love that cannot be weakened, even by rejection, a love that bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things. The sort of love that lays down its own life day, after day, after day, after day. And I think that Falcon Camp, in all its beauty, works for me like training for this kind of love. It takes more effort than normal life but that is good for me because it builds my heart muscles. Hopefully, it makes me a little bit more like Jesus. Grows in me a little more of his kind of love. Strong, fearless and unstoppable. Free runner love.