What Is Love?

 

We hear a lot about Love.   Christianity can be explained in three sentences:  Love God.  Love your neighbor.  Love yourself.  (I read this.  I did not think it up myself.)

But what does the church mean by love?   Certainly not romantic love, except maybe loving your neighbor.  It is hard to love.  How do we feel about the supervisors who screw us over or the neighbor who decided to love our significant other?  And our former significant other?

What about the Teapartiers or the Open Borders people?  What about welfare recipients?  Or Isis?

I, for one, don’t feel loving towards a lot of people.  This may lead to trouble about loving yourself.  Can we feel good about ourselves when we have such hateful feelings? 

A friend once told me that she got very annoyed at her neighbors who didn’t take their trash cans in on time.  She said she “wasn’t a Christian” because of it.

I said, “I’m not trying to be your pastor or anything, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a Christian.  It just means you’re not a particularly good one at that time.”  I don’t know if she believed me; we’re talking seventy some years of guilt producing conditioning.

And people have said that they couldn’t understand why we are told to love ourselves.  What about humility? You can be humble and still love yourself.  Not to an insult to God.  If you are good enough for God, you should be good enough for yourself.  And you can’t love anyone in any way if you don’t love yourself.

Basically, if God told you that if you did not want someone to have a merry Christmas, they would have a miserable one, and you wouldn’t get in trouble for it and you said, “Oh, what the heck, let the SOB or B have a nice holiday,” you are showing love.

Of course there are more charitable ways to do it, but this is the most basic.  We have to love, but we don’t have to like.

Do you have a s**t list?  Everyone who is on that list should be on your prayer list.

I’m not even going to try to talk about loving  God; it’s beyond me. As Dana Carvey used to say, “I’m only the churchlady” and I don’t want people to think I do a superiority dance whenever I write a post.

But hit it, Pearl, and we’ll dance for the fun or it!