Let's build a community of love

One of the things I launched this website for was to build a global community of people committed to Living in Love. I am a devout Christian. For Christians, love for God comes first and is the source of everything else. Yet this community is not only for Christians, and not only for religious people. So it is what Jesus called "the second most important commandment" (in the Jewish Torah) that is the basis for this community: Love your neighbour as you love yourself.  I have friends who I call my kindred who hold all kinds of beliefs or who are atheists, agnostics, or humanists. I call them my kin because of their practice of kindness. They care that the world has so much suffering. They act to change the world, reduce suffering, and increase happiness.  So I am searching for people like this. I am wanting to connect with them and connect them to one another. I am wanting to share ideas and skill and work together to do something special in the world. And I see Social Media as a tool for this. It may not be designed to bring rich and poor, powerful and powerless, together, we have to "engineer" that kind of connection. However I hope Social Media will naturally bring together those who wish to show kindness and work for justice in global relationships. 

I am wanting to find people willing to risk a radical obedience to love. I am not speaking of Jesus "new" commandment specifically to his followers that they should "Lay down their lives for one another" as he laid down his life for them. This is so open to abuse and an unhealthy kind of self-negation that I do not wish to point to that ideal in this community. Difficult enough is a radical commitment to simply love our neighbour AS WE LOVE OURSELVES.  This does not call for self-negation. Yet in a world in which I am part of the 1% that consumes 99% of the earths resources it is a quite scary commitment to make. What would it cost us, personally, to do our bit to even such impossibly unequal scales? Could we survive such sacrifice? 99% of the world are expected to survive far worse than a global "median". Yet it seems inconceivable to reduce my own consumption to what would be an equitable median.

So I want to suggest a more personal and realistic path for those beginning this journey or who are already on it and want to go deeper into love.

• Begin with friendship. Just as you might take, for the first time, the scary step of greeting and conversing respectfully with someone who lives on the street, I want to help those who would like to befriend others in poor communities to do so safely.  Safe friendship with those who are poor does not begin with giving money. It must not when on social media. Unfortunately, most of the people who ask you for money online are scammers. Others have genuine needs but are not truthful about those needs. So there has to be a careful process of "due dilligence" before giving money to people you only meet online. 
• Weed out the scammers and opportunists and allow a few friendships to grow.  In time what you will find is that you can get to know a few people so well that it does feel safe to give them money. Be aware, though, that there are scammers who "play the long game" and build trust over several months before they even mention money. FInally, they will make "a play" and ask for money in a way that seems plausable. So one of the things I want to offer in this community is support to discern who are genuine friends with genuine needs. 
  
• Often scammers will try to build a romantic relationship so steer of those. Or, at least, look for romantic connections online as a completely separate goal and keep money right out of it! The reason scammers use romantic trust is because the old adage "love is blind" is actually supported by solid neuro-science. The brain chemicals released by what science calls "limerence" tend to attach us to a feeling we so want to preserve that we ignore the warning signs we actually see from the beginning.  
• Assess what loving another as we love ourselves means for us. When we have confidence that we have built some real friendships with people who are genuinely poor and powerless to change their situation, then comes the challenging work of reflecting on our budgetting and asking what loving them as we love ourselves means for us.  The way I ask myself this question is to reflect on things I enjoy and imagine myself enjoying these things while my friends are experiencing deprivation. Some things I used to set aside money for each pay day have gone. I no longer have those things in my budget. That has freed significant money to give to others in need. 
• There are some traps in this. I have found one can become so frugal in this process that there are no margins for miscalculating one's own future needs. I have, for example, found I grossly underestimated car costs.  And my budget was so tight I had nowhere to take this from. So we do need to save some "for a rainy day" even though this is a luxury our poor friends do not have.
• Take care of yourself first. This is a principle that all disaster plans (including those on aircraft) include. Take care of yourself first so that you are free to effectively care for others. In a local community disaster we take care of ourself, then our household, then reach out to our family elsewhere, then check on others in our street, and so on. 
• Mental health needs are real needs. An area I have had to revisit is what I need for my own mental health. One of the first things I cut out of my budget, because it did not seem to have integrity when some of my friends had no food, was money set aside for coffees and eating at my local pub. I kept a small amount for one fortnightly meal with one person dear to me. I have found this is not enough. I live alone an allow myself few pleasures and I have found, when I am mentally and emotionally low, I sometimes actually need to have a meal at my local. It felt wrong to enjoy this when some of my friends had not food. And the habit of spending this just because I can is gone. And, when I know my friends have not food, I will sometimes fast a meal and pray for them as I feel my tummy complain. Yet I have had to revisit my budget and make space for those times when "taking care of myself first so that I can care for others" includes doing what I need to do for my mental health.
• Live in love in relationships of love. This is not about legalism and measuring what we enjoy against others. It is not about self-negation. It is about real relationships with people who have very little, who are suffering deprivation, who have no power to change their situation and living in love in relationships of love,