Love Anyway

A few months ago, my husband and I took an early fall vacation in the West. We made our way through several states, but key to the itinerary was to take the Durango to Silverton narrow gauge steam engine ride, an adventurous experience we’d done several times before. For anyone who has been bitten by the “steam engine bug,” it’s as simple as this: If you know, you know! For those who are not instantly impassioned by the thought, sight, smell, and sound of these magnificent machines of yesteryear, I offer to you that for those of us who are, the thrill is visceral, even emotional, and there is no substitute for its particular form of elation. 

The Durango to Silverton route climbs up and up and up through the San Juan Mountains for 45 miles. For a span, the engine that could hug the side of a cliff while wrapping its way around the peaks. Passengers on the gorge side observe their train car flush with the ledge that is a sheer 400-foot drop to the Animas River flowing through the base of the valley below. Some would flock to this adventure while others would prefer to pass on it, but there are spectacular sights you’d never witness if you elected not to engage, not the least of which is the stunning landscape at 9,300 feet as you chug into Silverton. 

We left for this trip two weeks after Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA was assassinated in Orem, Utah, on September 10, 2025. By that point, it seemed like everyone who had contempt for Charlie’s values was embarrassed that someone whose opinions were similar to their own had pulled the trigger. There were prolific misrepresentations of what Charlie stood for, and he was called a hater and evil, as if these determinations somehow lessened the impropriety of murder. This divide between those who grieved his death and those who were appalled by the grieving is a chasm that exists both culturally and inside the evangelical church. The hostilities and finger-wagging are flowing in both directions. It’s extreme. It’s layered with wrongly assigned motives. The intolerance is palpable. The views are wildly narrow. This cultural polarization persists as a national argument without resolution, and the church is engaged in it. How will we effect change when so much is awry? Love anyway. 

Loving anyway can be a tall order. It would be like riding that steam engine around the mountain on the cliff’s narrow ledge and feeling as though you were in the safest and most well-suited placement for arriving at a destination up ahead. Loving anyway means there are a lot of natural emotions that have to get out of the way. Somehow, we have to correctly prioritize convictions, opinions, and messaging. Somehow, we have to tether ourselves unbreakably to what really matters and seek fervently what is truly purposeful. Our collective goal is the eternal victory of humankind. It is not to win the thousands of battles that erupt in the flesh because of what we know about right and wrong. It is not to be the one to straighten others out on facts, even when compelled by the best of motives. God has a much keener role than just observing while we engage. 

Loving anyway requires surrender. Several years ago, I had a boss who believed in Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection, and that He was the way to salvation. This boss did not, however, embrace holy living. He was profane, he drank to the point of drunkenness, he enjoyed gambling the night away, and he was not above making coarse jokes. He noted that my Christianity defined me. Never once did he mock me for it or in any way attempt to shame me. Instead, he would frequently appear in my office at the end of the day as everyone was headed for home and begin asking questions about my faith, what I believed, and why. These regular conversations always came to a halt once we arrived at the topic of submission. For all his relentless curiosity about my faith in action, he could never find peace with the act of yielding to God, to giving up his own will. 

One day, I came to work, and my boss was gone. They’d fired him, not for ethical or moral reasons. They simply felt they could find someone else who would do his job better. That profane, loud, coarse partier was no longer dominating the atmosphere at work on our floor of the building. I wept. He was a person who spent his own time in the opposite of places I spent mine. He governed his life in such a way that we would seemingly have almost nothing in common. Nonetheless, I cherished that God gave me such an opportunity to pour Truth into his life. I prayed for him so often and wanted so deeply to be present for his repentance and spiritual harvest. It was not to be, and the Spirit made that clear to me. I was left to accept that someone on my mission field had been plucked from my orbit, and it was time for me to, of things, submit. It was time to surrender it to God. 

Hard as it was for me to accept, my former boss’s handle on the Truth wasn’t reliant on me. It wasn’t my role to bring about his conversion. It was my job to love anyway, even while he swore, drank too much, and told coarse jokes. It was my job to love anyway when he grilled me, sometimes for hours, about my beliefs. It was my job to love anyway after he had disappeared into the folds of this dark world without knowing if someone else would enter into his space and be present for his spiritual harvest. When Proverbs says, “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in people” (Psalm 118:8, NASB throughout), we can apply that even to ourselves. What we can achieve, even for the right reasons, amounts to nothing without God’s will defining it. Loving anyway requires surrendering the entirety of any circumstance, start to finish, to God. “Whatever you do, do your work heartily as for the Lord and not for people” (Colossians 3:23). 

Loving Anyway requires forgiveness. Forgiveness is in order in both incidental offenses and intentional harm. When the Scripture says we should love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 12:31), such a love is from and through God alone. Any love we realize in this world apart from God does not equip us to comprehensively love our neighbor as ourselves. Loving anyway, even when harmed by another, should be experienced by its recipient as a unique form of love. This form of love urges the heart to let go of wrongs. In fact, seeing humankind through God’s eyes and not our own is a must to love them as God would love them. When the heart wants what God wants, forgiveness increasingly becomes involuntary. 

The scripture makes it clear that our own forgiveness is intrinsically tied to the forgiveness of others. “For if you forgive other people for their offenses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive other people, then your Father will not forgive your offenses” (Matthew 6:14-15). God cannot ignore our failure to look through His eyes to see those He loves. There may be no more powerful example of forgiveness in these times than Erika Kirk, just eleven days a widow, declaring through sobs about the assassin and in front of the world, “This man, I forgive him.”  

“Let the peace of Christ, to which you were indeed called in one body, rule in your hearts; and be thankful” (Colossians 3:15). Love anyway. 

Loving anyway is a matter of prayer. This business of praying for your enemies (Matthew 5:44) would be impossible if we hadn’t loved anyway enough to surrender and loved anyway enough to forgive. Prayer is the source of strength to get us to and through both surrender and forgiveness. It certainly is the most profound act within our complete control as it relates to those who are against us. It can be hard to know how to pray for the enemy, but here are a few ways I’ve approached it. I have prayed for the truth to be evident; I have prayed that God would lead all to righteousness; I have prayed for those who harm to be transformed so that my children and grandchildren can inherit a world with evidence that others have attempted to mend it; I have even prayed it would be easy to do the right thing. “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Love anyway. 

The ultimate demonstration of Love Anyway is Jesus Christ from the garden to the Cross. He prayed, “If it be thy will.” He asked God to forgive those who were watching Him suffer and die. He surrendered with the words, “It is finished.” His complete trust in God and obedience to our Heavenly Father is because Jesus loves us no matter what. He has loved us through it all … anyway. 

To do well in a life where so many are estranged from one another, surrender, forgiveness, and prayer equip us to take it on. Such a journey is as safe as Jesus’ journey to the tomb with a grand destination no one should miss. 

That ride along a cliff’s edge up into the mountains from Durango to Silverton is truly a great act of faith in something men fashioned together when laying down rails almost 150 years ago. Having ridden it multiple times now, one of my greatest joys is seeing people who are riding it for the first time react to the experience. The thrill of the ride is only surpassed by the beauty to behold. I’d always wanted to visit Colorado when the Aspen trees’ leaves were changing, so we planned our vacation schedule accordingly. As I sat surrounded by the jubilation of first-time riders on that narrow gauge as those drivers and pistons chugged and the steam rolled from the smokestack and the whistle blew with Silverton just ahead, I thought to myself as I saw the beautiful scene before me, “Wow! And Heaven is going to be more beautiful than this!” Love anyway.