Love is at the heart of the YMCA.
Love is why we strive at the Y to be “for all” and is the core of “Christian principles” and what we ultimately mean by a “healthy spirit, mind and body.”
To “love, serve and care for all as the hands and heart of Jesus” is becoming a kind of call to action by many YMCA leaders and branches that want to lift up the “C” in their Y and community.
Saint Paul reminds us that without love we are a clanging gong, we gain nothing and are nothing.
Whoa.
The Y.M.C.A. was founded in love, it has survived and thrived because of love.
George Williams, a young Christian man, and eleven of his beloved friends formed a prayer-full association on June 6, 1844 in London, England – a work of love that miraculously has taken root around the world and blooms still today, almost eighteen decades later: love endures, it never fails.
What does this kind of love look like in a YMCA? When do you see love at work through the Y?
When the Y is patient and kind.
When Y leaders are NOT envious or boastful.
When the Y honors others, when it is NOT self-seeking.
When Y members are slow to anger and keep no record of wrong.
When Y leaders rejoice with the truth and take no delight in evil.
When the YMCA protects, trusts, hopes.
Someday the Y.M.C.A. will close its doors for the last time, and what will have mattered most to the very end was our Faith, our Hope, and our Love; but the greatest of all is Love.
For Christians in the Y, for George Williams when he started the YMCA, love is not a attitude or posture, love is not a noun or verb, love is not words or works, love is personal, it is Reality, it is a Person, it has a Heart and is the Ground of Being – love has a name: Jesus – in whose face we can see and know God, who is Love.
If you are a Christian in the YMCA, and are being inspired by the Spirit of God to love one another, to love your neighbor, to love the stranger, to love your enemy with all your spirit, mind and body (as God has loved you), then you may appreciate this prayer by Soren Kierkegaard, written as a kind of foundation for his ground-breaking 1847 publication “Works of Love”.
I have taken it and adapted it as a Christian Prayer for the YMCA, an organization founded a few years earlier by George Williams because of the love of Christ, by the will of God, as part of the answer to Jesus’ prayer for God’s Kingdom to come and that “they all may be one.”
How could love be rightly discussed if You were forgotten, O God of Love, source of all love in heaven and earth, You who spared nothing but gave all in love, You who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in You!
How could love properly be discussed if You were forgotten, You who made manifest what love is, You, our Saviour and Redeemer, who gave Yourself to save all!
How could love be rightly discussed if You were forgotten, O Spirit of Love, You who take nothing for Your own but remind us of that sacrifice of love, remind the believer to love as he is loved, and his neighbor as himself!
O Eternal Love, You who are everywhere present and never without witness wherever You are called upon, be not without witness in what is said here about love or about the works of love.
There are only a few acts which human language specifically and narrowly calls works of love, but heaven is such that no act can be pleasing there unless it is an act of love – sincere in self-renunciation, impelled by love itself, and for this very reason claiming no compensation.
Prayer by Soren Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, published 09/29/1847
May we who are Christians in the Y never cease to pray in Eternal Love for our branches, associations, and regional alliances; for our staff and volunteers; for our members and the communities in which they live.
But more than pray in love, may we be a practical blessing for all through our works of love as “little Christs” – an answer to prayer for those whose backs are against the wall, for those who are giving up on faith, hope and love: this is who the Y was started for in 1844 this is why the Y was started, and this is how the Y will endure beyond 2044, for God is love, and Jesus has instructed and shown us how to love, and we have the Spirit of Love within us – Their Eternal Love which never fails.
