Disclosure: Argus Leader reporter Danielle Ferguson is credited as an editor of the book “Love Has a Name,” featured in this story.
Adam Weber had no idea that when he started writing a book about love that it would release during a time of unrest in America.
The 38-year-old founder of Embrace Church only wanted to share his journey of re-learning the value of expressing love after going through a period in his life when he had wanted to close himself and his family off from other people.
“I was, for the first time in my life, not wanting to love anyone away from my wife and kids and few close friends,” Weber said.
The Milbank-area native cataloged stories of love with 27 people from his life, many from Sioux Falls, and combined them into his new book, “Love Has a Name.”
Each chapter is named after a person, and each tells a story of Weber’s interactions with that person and how love played a role in shaping their relationship and his life.
Weber’s book, his second, is set to release Aug. 26. Published by an imprint of Penguin-Random House, “Love Has a Name” will be available online at Walmart, Target, Amazon and wherever else books are sold.
The Sioux Falls Business Journal talked with Weber about how his latest book can be applied in a world affected by the coronavirus pandemic and social unrest in major cities across the United States.
The following conversation has been edited for length.
What inspired you to write this book?
I think the older you get, life has a way of taking things out of you, through hardships and trials and bitterness and jadedness, things just disappear from your life. And for the longest time loving people was a strong suit of mine, like I just naturally loved people. And about two years ago it came to the place where I didn’t want to love anyone.
As a Christian, God says loving him and loving others is the most important thing so I didn’t have any option. When I wrote it, obviously I had no idea that it would be releasing in a time where we’ve never been more polarized and divided. I could have never imagined where our world would be.
What are you seeing in the world that people might find relevant?
Love is one of the banners that we carry as humans. If you are any decent human being you should love people. It's not just a Christian thing it’s kind of all humanity.
We’re shouting love and singing love.
We’re shouting love, that is until someone disagrees with you or cuts you off or thinks differently than you or lives differently than you and then all of a sudden it’s, instead of loving people we immediately shut people off.
It’s like, ‘you think differently than me? I don’t want to be friends.’
It’s so weird, it’s like we carry a mantra of love and yet we judge people, belittle people, cancel people, basically do anything but love people.
I think all of us in general are getting to that place where it’s like I want to look out for me, number one, I want to look out for my family and close friends and really, away from that, I want to put a gate up. I’m tired of people. I’m sick of people.
What sort of useful guidance will people find for making a difference?
Something changes when we get to know a person’s name. In a bigger sense, something changes when we get to know a person’s story. It just totally changes. It changes for the person and it changes for us.
There’s something so powerful when someone else knows our name. A name makes a person feel noticed and seen and valued. When someone knows your name it’s a wonderful, beautiful thing.
Even in our polarized society it’s easy to be upset, whether we fight about mask-wearing, pandemics, racism or the next topic of choice. It’s easy to treat people as a blur of faces, basically to remove their humanity.
When you start to get to know their story, you start to go, oh that’s why you think like that.
It totally changes from a blur of faces or it’s just a group of conservative people who have lost their minds, or it’s a group of progressive people who have lost their minds.
Can you talk about the book itself, the format?
It’s made up of 27 people, so each chapter is the name of the person. None of them are famous people. None of them have huge platforms. They’re very everyday people who have either shown me love or have been people that I’ve tried to love myself.
Most of them are local here in Sioux Falls. Some of them are close friends that I’ve known for years, literally since high school and others are people that I’ve just met for about 10 seconds. It’s just different things they’ve taught me about love.
How should Christians apply the lessons in this book?
Hopefully we should be people who build bridges with people who are different from us rather than people who draw lines in the sand and cut people off.
And sadly, oftentimes Christians are known for doing anything but loving people, which is bizarre and yet often true.
In this time, one of the most powerful ways we can show love is just listening to someone. Not listening to speak but listening to listen. Whether someone’s grieving, whether someone feels misunderstood, whether someone feels unnoticed.
Jesus, he was such a person that no matter who you were, no matter what you believe, no matter what you stood for, people were drawn to him. It was actually the people who most disagreed with him who were actually closest to him.
One of the things for myself that I have regularly asked, do I have friends – not acquaintances but close friends – who think completely different from me?
If I don’t have any friends politically that are conservative and progressive, people who believe this and believe that, I’m not much like Jesus in that area.
Am I person that you can have conversation on a hard topic with? Or am I somebody that you need to walk around on egg shells with because it’s like oh, they’re going to explode if I think differently from them?
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Embrace pastor to release book on love amid COVID-19 and social unrest - Argus Leader
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