Loving the Hard to Like Some people are just harder to love than others—we all have that gregarious friend we liked the moment we met them—but love is not easy, even when you love a lovable person. Love does not mean you are filled with warm, fuzzy feelings. It is not a big purple dinosaur dispensing free hugs and sing-along songs. True love goes against our very nature. Love is both a wonderful bliss and a promise of pain. It carries with it the risk of loss and an almost unbearable threat: It requires us to risk our wants, desires and priorities for the sake of someone else. The real challenge of love is that it requires us to be selfless when we are all selfish by nature. Love, then, is a defiance of our own instinct. When the person for whom we take these risks is easy to love and loves us in return, the notion seems reasonable. But what about everyone else? Are we really expected to set aside what we want and desire for some person we don’t even know? Is that what love means? Is that what love does? If so, that’s not an easy pill to swallow. In the Church, we talk about loving our enemies. But truth be told, our enemies are not the hardest people to love. It’s not those who antagonize us, but the pariahs, the socially awkward—the people with boundary issues, the guy with the wildly inappropriate jokes, the girl who talks like she’s paid by the word count—who pose the real challenge. Some people are just unlikable. Try as you might, you cannot muster the desire to spend time with them. You don’t want to talk to them, and when given the opportunity, you will go out of your way to avoid the awkward, culturally expected niceties. We tell ourselves we love them; we just don’t want to spend time with them or be seen in public with them. One trick we are taught to master from a young age is the ability to justify. We rationalize not liking certain people because they just aren’t likable. Yet Jesus has the audacity to tell us to love other people. Not just that, He says it’s the second most important commandment in all the law. The only thing more important than loving other people is loving God Himself. But surely Jesus doesn’t understand what He’s asking of us. He doesn’t have to smell the close-talker at work who has yet to discover the purpose of soap. He hasn’t had to have a lengthy conversation with the woman who shares intimate details about the lives of her cats. No, Jesus doesn’t realize how hard it is. It’s not like the people He came to love nailed Him to a cross.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 17:34:33 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015