Love Has a Name: Learning to Love the Different, the Difficult, & Everyone Else by Adam Weber (Waterbrook; 2020)

LOVE HAS A NAME is a new book by pastor and author Adam Weber on the Christian call to love others. Jesus taught that His followers would not be known by their faith or hope for the future. Christians are to be known by their love. And in the world we are in now, people need to be reminded and exhorted to love with Christ’s love.

Weber does not do a word study on the topic of love; neither does he provide a formulaic “six steps to love people” approach. Instead, the author focuses on real people in his life (with names changed for their privacy) who have either demonstrated love toward him or who Weber is working to show love to. Throughout the book, the author strives to encourage Christians not to just love people in our immediate circles but to actively look for people to love who might not be easy to love. He always uses his personal examples of love for and from various characters to tie back to New Testament accounts of Jesus and how He exemplified the type of love being discussed in each short chapter.

Another part of loving people is to know how to receive love from others because often we can miss little things that people do for us that actually demonstrate the way that Jesus loves. And suppose we neglect these little moments in life. In that case, we deny ourselves the opportunity to show love and make real heart connections. One trick Weber wants to pass along to his readers is that they need to learn people’s names they interact with because this creates an immediate positive impact on another person’s heart and soul when we make an effort to ask for a person’s name. Because this is the way that Jesus loves.

Weber writes in an enjoyably breezy and conversational tone that makes the reader feel at once comfortable and curious to find out how to experience at least a bit of the obvious joy for life and Jesus that he exudes in his words and stories about himself.

This book is a quick and enjoyable read that is readily accessible for all sorts of Christian readers. I am an extreme introvert, and some of these ways of loving people are downright terrifying. Still, the joyous enthusiasm of the author leads even a person like me to start to hope for moving out of my comfort zone for the benefit of others — and by the effort made, to touch my heart and foster a yearning in my spirit to be more like Jesus, the Great Lover. Highly recommended!