week 4 deep love diving challenges

(If you're planning on joining me for this week's challenges, I'd love to know...and to hear about your ideas and experience for loving God with all your strength and loving strangers.)  

My focus on loving God this week is to try and understand and carry out what it means to love Him with all of my strength. If you'd like to join me in this strength-loving-God journey, here are this week's challenges (some of these can happen over the course of several days or be repeated):

• Meditate, pray about, think on what it means to love God with all of our strength
• Hunt up Scriptures which talk about God's strength vs. our own
• Fast
• Truthfully, I'm coming up short on this one, so I'll probably be spending most of my time thinking and praying about it. And if inspiration strikes, I'll add more challenges here. Strangely enough, I can think of tons of ideas for loving strangers. Good thing God said that whatever we did "for the least of these" we do for Him. And because He is faithful: take a walk one-on-one with God

My focus on loving others this week is to love strangers. If you'd like to join me in loving people you've never met before, here are this week's challenges:

• Let another person go first. Just because.
• Give a card to a stranger. I suggest finding a generic, possibly humorous one. I found one on faith that didn't have to do with birthdays, getting well, grieving or thanking someone. That was a needle in a haystack and I found it at Hallmark.
• Pay for someone you don't know. This could be buying a $5 gift card at a coffee place or grocery store or paying someone else's toll at a toll booth.
• Pray for people in need. Visit an organization dedicated to helping others (like World Vision), find a story that moves your heart on their site and start praying for ones you've never met.
• Buy at least one fair trade product this week. In doing so you are loving a stranger by helping them earn a better wage and work toward enjoying the same rights we take for granted in our first world countries.
• Do a love stretch: Think about sharing a meal with a stranger. This one will take prayer but please don't take any crazy risks. Do this publicly and possibly with a friend along. 

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