Loving our fellow disciples should be natural and easy. At times, though, it can seem incredibly difficult. Yet, genuinely to love one another (including those we work with, shoulder to shoulder) was a demand Christ Jesus made of his disciples.
Jesus expected his followers and his church to be healing. To be effective healers, however, the disciples needed to learn a great deal about the essence of their Master's teachings. And that essence was love. The disciples needed to develop a more mature understanding of divine Love, God, not only for effective healing but in order to be able to establish a unified and progressive church. These were the people who were to carry forth Jesus' mission. They needed to grasp the deeper meaning of his teachings and works—to learn the type of spiritual maturity, the type of spiritual discipline, it takes to work together with a sense of oneness.
It seems evident from the Gospels that Jesus spent countless hours instructing and counseling his disciples. A great deal of this training had to do with the requirements of love, including love for one another. We tend to think the disciples were born with spiritual genius. They were not. It may be comforting for us to realize that as they were learning the lessons of love, the disciples made mistakes!
