Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. – Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
There are a lot of things going on today that are polarizing people. It covers all my social media feeds and honestly I’m getting a little tired of it. You can’t check Facebook without seeing something about the upcoming election. You can’t check twitter without seeing something about HB2. And I’m not here to take a stance on anything or talk about what is right and what is wrong. When I see all this it just makes me wonder, what if we just loved people?
Now I am certainly not perfect at this. I yelled at my wife just today. So I by no means have arrived at a place where I am perfect at showing love. But what if it the midst of all the chaos we just chose to love? What if we loved instead of hiding behind some social media profile? What if we loved instead of going to some protest and yelling at people? Let’s be honest, when have those things successfully changed someone’s opinion?
You may support Clinton in this upcoming election or you may not. You may think Trump is a great candidate or you may think the exact opposite. You may support HB2 or you may think it needs to be overturned. You may think guns are great or you may think we need a lot more control over them. But why should we sit around and call everyone who doesn’t agree with us bigoted and idiotic? I’m not really sure what we are expecting to accomplish by doing this.
C.S. Lewis said it perfectly. Rather than wondering if we do love our neighbor, just act like you do. Fake it if you have to. And when we make this decision something amazing will happen. You will actually start to love your neighbor. You will start to realize that they are a human just like you. We all have our imperfections and we all deserved to be loved in spite of them.
Even Jesus said love is one of the most important things we could do. Matthew 22:36-38 says, “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” I love myself. I’m certainly not going to go around and call myself an idiot for what I believe. Why should I go and do that to someone else?
There is something that is more important than an election, or a bill, or a lifestyle, or anything else. That thing is love. No matter what you believe, if you love others you will see amazing things happen. If you want to bring people to the table and see change, show those people love.
until next time…