When Love Is Hard

“Woman, 77, attacked with spades.” “Hijackers assault man, take car.” “Woman swops girl for cocaine.” “Farm attacks: Costs mounts.”

It doesn’t take much more than common sense to realise that loving others is very, very hard to do. For example, just reading newspaper headlines like those above will give you dozens of reasons NOT to love others. We read of despicable actions by criminals, or ill-considered statements from community leaders that leave us feeling more than a little threatened and abused. Inside we feel nothing like love for them, but only anger and frustration.

Well, Jesus never said that loving others would be easy. The Gospels teach us that Jesus challenged people to love not just their neighbours, but also their enemies, and to love not just their friends but also strangers. There is just no way to get around it – Jesus wants his followers to enter the world equipped primarily with his love. This means, for example, when we read or hear about someone who drives us crazy because of their arrogance, prejudice, or cruelty, that Jesus wants us to learn to love them.

Yes, even them.

Eugene Peterson once wrote that “Relationships form part of the very fabric of redemption.” What Peterson meant by this is that God uses the warp and woof, ins and outs, ups and downs, victories and failures, laughter and tears of relationships to work his saving power into us – to knead it into the dough of our souls if that makes any sense.

You see whether we like it or not relationships change us. Think about any significant relationship that you have, whether it is a positive and life-affirming one, or a negative one say with a grumpy, domineering boss. Think about how much that relationship takes control of your day, how it affects what you think about and how you react to things.

Sin, really, is a failure to love. There is this scene in the movie ‘Amazing Grace’ where the reformed slave trader John Newton talks about his slaving activities and describes his fellow slave traders in the following way: “We were apes and they were human.”

What he meant by this is that his actions in treating his fellow human beings as less than human actually ended up making him less of a functioning person. Failing to love dehumanises us; it makes us less, but conversely learning to love and acts of love, especially when they are sacrificial and hard to do, makes us somehow more than we were before.

Our greatest purpose in life is to love each other just like God loved us through Jesus.

Everyone talks about achieving great things with their lives. And by that they mean fulfilling the potential of their gifts and talents. Yet, in God’s eyes you achieve great things when you love – when you seek to fulfil the full potential of your spirit and character.

The good news is that because relationships affects all of us so much, our loving actions can be passed along in quite amazing ways through our complex web of inter-relationships. This means that loving others, if healthily and passionately pursued, will not only transform us but also our surrounding social dimensions. It could even possibly change some of those news headlines which drive us crazy every week.

(The headlines above are taken from News24.com, dated 25-03-2010).