Love From The Center Of Who You Are

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil, cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. [NIV]
-St. Paul of Tarsus, Letter to the Romans, 12:9-10

Every generation has challenges to face. The daily news keeps reminding us of that. Global and local events also remind us that there is always darkness, there is always evil, there is always sorrow, there will always be hate. The questions is though: when you face challenging situations in your heart, in your home, in your community, in our nation, will you have enough light, enough good, enough joy, enough love to overcome?

Probably not on your own. We need friends to help us make it through. I believe that we especially need the Lord, who faced the darkest hate in our world – and he overcome it with light and love. He can send us friends, he can send us wisdom and strength, he can be with us as we strive together to overcome our hatred.

In our world we aspire to love others, but often succumb to hating others. As we seek to serve and lead in our homes and communities, may we be empowered by the Spirit of the Lord to let go of hating others. May we love from the center of who we are in Christ, to hate what is evil and cling to what is good, to love our enemies and bless those who curse us.

May these quotes on love and hate inspire you to honest reflection, candid confession, and a lighter tomorrow:

Hatred paralyses life; love releases it.
Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it.
Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
-Anne Lamott

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
-Jonathan Swift

In time we hate that which we often fear.
-William Shakespeare

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.
-George Bernard Shaw

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love.
This is how the whole scheme of things works.
All good things are difficult to achieve;
and bad things are very easy to get.
-Rene Descartes

Hate is too great a burden to bear.
It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.
-Coretta Scott King

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself.
What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.
-Herman Hesse

Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.
-Henry Emerson Fosdick

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
-James Baldwin

When we don’t know who to hate, we hate ourselves.
-Chuck Palahniuk

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Forgiveness is Spring For the Soul

Spring is a season of new beginnings. If you were going to pray and work for a new beginning with people in your life, what would be key actions to take and attitudes to cultivate?

I’ve found that forgiveness is central to the season of spring in my relationships. I resist forgiveness though. I either don’t take it seriously enough, or I don’t want to admit that I did something wrong and need to make amends.

I’ve always appreciated Kierkegaard’s take on Christianity and forgiveness – he puts it in a way that startles me and even rattles me. He doesn’t let me settle with platitudes about living out my faith – he challenges me to re-examine my assumptions and habits.

Maybe he can do that for you too – even better, re-inspire us to keep learning how to forgive and love as Christ does for us, and the world.

“Christianity’s view is: forgiveness is forgiveness; your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness which you give, you receive, not contrariwise, that you give the forgiveness for which you receive.”

“It is as if Christianity would say: pray to God humbly and believing in your forgiveness for he really is compassionate in such a way as no human being is; but if you will test how it is with respect to the forgiveness, then observe yourself. If honestly before God you wholeheartedly forgive your enemy (but remember that if you do, God sees it), then you dare hope also for your forgiveness, for it is one and the same.”

“God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive your trespasses. It is only an illusion to imagine that one himself has forgiveness, although one is slack in forgiving others.”

“It is also conceit to believe in one’s own forgiveness when one will not forgive, for how in truth should one believe in forgiveness if his own life is a refutation of the existence of forgiveness!”

“For, Christianly understood, to love human beings is to love God and to love God is to love human beings; what you do unto men you do unto God, and therefore what you do unto men God does unto you.”

“If you are embittered towards men who do you wrong, you are really embittered towards God, for ultimately it is still God who permits wrong to be done to you. If, however, you gratefully take the wrongs from God’s hand ‘as a good and perfect gift,’ you do not become embittered towards men either.”

“If you will not forgive, you essentially want something else, you want to make God hard-hearted, that he should not forgive, either: how, then should this hard-hearted God forgive you? If you cannot bear the offenses of men against you, how should God be able to bear your sins against him?”

“If you have never been solitary, you have also never discovered that God exists. But if you have been truly solitary, then you also learned that everything you say to and do to other human beings God simply repeats; he repeats it with the intensification of infinity. The word of blessing or judgment which you express concerning someone else, God repeats; he says the same word about you, and this same word is blessing or judgment over you.”

“Such a person will certainly avoid speaking to God about the wrongs of others towards him, about the speck in his brother’s eye, for such a person will rather speak to God only about grace, lest this fateful word of justice lose everything for him through what he himself has called forth, the rigorous like-for-like.”

Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, p348-353

On Doing Good To Everyone – Even Those No Longer With You

If you’ve downloaded the free YouVersion.com Bible app onto your phone, Galatians 6:10 was the verse today, and depending on your settings, the image above would have showed up on your home screen. (If you’ve not downloaded the app, or set it to show you a verse each day, try it – I think you’ll find great value in it).

I appreciated reading the verse this morning, I agreed with it in my head, but then I thought about how tired my heart feels, and got a little anxious as I drove to work about how much good I might need to give out today.

It made me think of what other people are going through that is even more painful and exhausting than my current circumstances. Grief and regret, guilt and shame, disappointments and doubts – they are part of my life, maybe yours, and most everyone else. They can undermine our resolve to do good, sap our energy, distort our vision of the future.

But pain and suffering can also connect us. If we will abide in love.

As you contemplate the grief and regrets in your life, consider these writings on love, on doing good, on abiding and being present – with those still with you in body, and those with you only in memory. They continue to be a source of wisdom and healing for me, may they be good for your soul too:

The one who truly loves never falls away from love.

He can never reach the breaking point. Yet, is it always possible to prevent a break in a relationship between two persons, especially when the other has given up? One would certainly not think so. Is not one of the two enough to break the relationship?

In a certain sense it is so. But if the one who loves is determined to not fall away from love, she can prevent the break, she can perform this miracle; for if she perseveres, a total break can never really come to be.

By abiding, the one who loves transcends the power of the past. We transform the break into a possible new relationship, a future possibility.

The one who loves that abides belongs to the future, to the eternal. From the angle of the future, the break is not really a break, but rather a possibility. But the powers of the eternal are needed for this. The one who loves must abide in love, otherwise the heartache of the past still has the power to keep alive the break.

The whole thing depends upon how the relationship is regarded, and the one who loves- she abides.

Can anyone determine how long a silence must be in order to say, “Now there is no more conversation”?

Put the past out of the way; drown it in the forgiveness of the eternal by abiding in love. Then the end is the beginning and there is no break!

But the one who loves abides. “I will abide,” he says. “Therefore we are still on the path of life together.” And is this not so?

What marvelous strength love has! The most powerful word that has ever been said, God’s creative word, is: “Be.” But the most powerful word any human being has ever said is, “I abide.”

Reconciled to himself and to his conscience, the one who loves goes without defense into the most dangerous battle. She only says: “I abide.” But she will conquer, conquer by her abiding.

There is no misunderstanding that cannot be conquered by our abiding, no hate that can ultimately hold up to our abiding – in eternity if not sooner. If time cannot, at least the eternal shall wrench away the other’s hate.

Yes, the eternal will open our eyes for love. In this way love never fails – it abides.

May these curing words of Kierkegaard impart a fresh perspective on the breaches of love in your life.

As you grieve and mourn the endings in your life, may you learn to abide in love.

We may not get to choose our death day, but we do get to choose to do good to everyone with all of the days we have left.