"How to identify love by what it is not:
Love doesn’t use a fist.
Love never calls you fat or lazy or ugly.
Love doesn’t laugh at you in front of your friends.
It is not in Love’s interest for your self esteem to be low.
Love is a helium-based emotion: it always takes the high road.
Love does not make you deposit your paycheck into its bank account.
Love certainly never, never, never brings the children into it.
Love does not ask or even want you to change.
But if you do change,
Love is as excited about this change as you are, if not more so. And if you go back to the way you were before you changed, Love will go back with you.
Love does not maintain a list of your flaws and weaknesses. Love believes you.
Love is patient, but it does not make a point of showing you how patient it is. It is critical to understand the distinction." -Augusten Burroughs
We say I love you a lot in our culture; I say I love you a lot in the context of my every day life. And I mean it, for sure, even in the joking or giggles. When I say that I love you I mean that I will take myself down in order to keep you steady and safe. I mean that I will give you all that I can and more, even if it breaks my heart again and again. But this quote hit me hard because the love that I offer and give so carelessly doesn’t always look like the best kind of love there is. Because love isn’t just for the people we can get things from, it isn’t just for the people who make us giggle or sit across from us in coffee shops for hours. Love, real love, like the kind of love Jesus calls us to hold out to everyone with open hands, means entering into the ugliest places we can imagine and smiling at the beauty we cannot yet see. The Jesus kind of love means being patient with the people that make us pull our hair out, it means not parading the weaknesses of others out to show, it means not nit-picking and criticizing, but allowing the people we love to grow and change and be who they are, even with their flaws.
It means believing the homeless people that they really are homeless and that they really do need money for food, and not keeping your money to yourself because “You don’t want it to go to the wrong hands.” It means believing the customers who are crying in your restaurant and not even asking for free food, but giving it to them anyways because it’s the kind and right thing to do. Love is not making fun of the people that get on your nerves, and it is most definitely not criticizing a complete stranger on their appearance — be it dress, style, weight, hair color, makeup choice, tattoos. Love is not looking at a particular group of people and pointing fingers until you run out of fingers to point. Love is never using force against another, especially not to the point where one party dies, no matter the situation or cause.
Love is not looking at someone and judging them by their race, clothing, gender, or how low their pants sag. Love is not an excuse to call someone out on what you think they’re doing wrong, it isn’t a tool to make yourself look better in contrast to the person you’re supposedly loving, and it isn’t saying, “I wasn’t going to say this because of how much I love you but…" It isn’t saying, “I love you but here’s the list of things you’re doing wrong in life.” It is meeting the people you see struggling where they are at and caring for them there, instead of pointing out that they are struggling. Love is seeing someone wandering and holding them tighter, not pushing them away because of the sin that is so repulsive to you. It is seeking out those who are different from you to show them the best love you can offer, not so you can try to change them. Love is allowing someone to be himself or herself even when the person that they are contradicts what you believe or hurts your feelings or your pride. Love, the kind that had Jesus dead on a cross, means putting yourself in danger to show people, near and far, a glimpse of Christ in hopes that somehow they will meet Jesus through your minuscule sacrifices. Love is not hiding your treasures for yourself, but giving freely without complaining; love is not some emotion reserved for only those who return it, love is for those who hate you.
Love is especially for those who want to kill you — for ISIS, for the thieves and murderers and the rapists and the worst of the worst. I promise you that if these people turn to Jesus and repent and believe God will not turn them away from His everlasting love. No sin is ever to great to defeat the grace that has been given to us, the grace that showers us daily when we aren’t even watching, the grace that showers the people we hate while we clench our teeth at the fact that they too can have everlasting life. Love is realizing that it is better that way. That it is the absolute best thing that the person who hurt you worst will one day brush shoulders with you in heaven. It’s hard. It isn’t easy. No one ever said it would be; and why should we expect it to be? We are made of more than skin and bones to follow mindlessly, we are chock full of emotion and heart and worth and power.
Our unwavering senses of right and wrong do not make it easy for us to see eye to eye with someone who stands on the opposite side of the firing squads. But to them what they are doing is right. To ISIS what they are doing is what they believe deeply they have been called to do, and from where I sit that is so heartbreakingly wrong and it aches to think that someday they will stand before God and find that what they gave their lives for, what they gave their children’s lives for was not a worthy cause at all. So we pray, we ought to pray, we ought to wail and gnash our teeth and fast for these people that they find the light before it is too late, not blow them to bits with bombs and words and anger. Jesus died for them too. He did, and right now they are so lost they can’t even see that they don’t know where they’re going.
Not all Muslims are radical to the point of ISIS, I promise you not everyone who looks remotely Middle Eastern is plotting your death and right now they probably need your kindness more than ever, because everyone else in the world is suspicious and doubting and building up walls to keep them out. Love enters into the spaces that hate has left empty; love washes over the walls and wipes away all the messy bits. It stands firm through the storm, it sends care packages and letters to those who are hurting and those who need extra sunshine on particularly dark days. Love doesn’t need the answers to all of the questions before it takes action, love does. Love is a verb, a way of life, an annoyingly positive viewpoint that refuses to be anything but optimistic. Love sees through Jesus’s eyes, and from that viewpoint everyone is worthy of dying for.
"You have heard that it was said, You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you so that you will be acting as children of your Father who is in heaven. He makes the sun rise on both the evil and the good and sends rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love only those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing? Don’t even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore, just as your heavenly Father is complete in showing love to everyone, so also you must be complete.”
Matthew 5:43-48
