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Key Bible Verse: May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you (1 Thessalonians 3:12). Bonus Reading: 1 Thessalonians 2:6b-12

I went on a missionary trip to Springfield, Massachusetts, to witness to Spanish-speaking families, mostly from Puerto Rico. They were very poor and lived in ramshackle apartment buildings near a shut-down textile mill. My partner was Eloy Cruz, a remarkable Cuban-American who pastored a small church in Brooklyn. He always seemed to know exactly what to say and formed an instant intimacy with the people whose homes we entered. With the simplest words, he could capture their imaginations and souls.

As we prepared to say good-bye at the end of the week, I asked him about what made him so gentle but so effective as a Christian witness, and he was quite disconcerted. He finally said, "Pues, Nuestro Senor no puede hacer mucho con un hombre que es duro." (Well, our Savior cannot do much with a man who is hard.) He noted that Christ Himself, although the Son of God, was always gentle, especially with those who were poor or weak. He went on to say that he always tried to follow a simple rule: "You only have to have two loves in your life—for God, and for the person in front of you at any particular time."

—Jimmy Carter in Living Faith

• How much can the Savior do with you? Jesus is here to touch you and soften your heart.

Thought to Apply: Our job is to love people we don't have to love.

—KEITH MILLER (author)

Credits: Adapted from —Thursday: Living Faith (Jimmy Carter, Times Books, 1996)

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Men of Integrity. For reprint information click here.

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Prayer for the Week

Father, help me live under the promise that you are a friend to sinners—even to me.

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