When people are wrong, love them. When people are right, love them. When people are arrogant, self-righteous, stubborn, unkind, love them. Jesus shows us this throughout all of the New Testament. His stories, assembled together, are like a how-to book for loving people. He loves people through mistakes and through hardships. He even loves people he knows are going to betray him. As he took his final breath, he even prayed for those who killed him.Love.
Nothing is simpler, and yet nothing seems quite as difficult for us imperfect humans, especially in these tumultuous times. Martin Luther King Jr. got it though. He understood this. He knew that hatred plus hatred would never equal love. He knew God’s Word and he believed it, and you couldn’t convince him that evil should be repayed with evil.
I have a toddler who proves this point for me almost every day. The louder she objects, the angrier I get. The angrier and louder I get, the louder she objects. However, if I stop and hug her in the middle of her fits of anger, it calms the storm. It doesn’t happen right away, but confusion often sets in; wait, you’re supposed to be angry with me…not hugging me. What’s happening? And then I often have a better chance at getting to the root of the problem. But our anger will often just ricochet, back and forth off of each other, picking up speed, without bothering to look for solutions. Love doesn’t ricochet; it soaks. Love doesn’t bounce off, quickly searching for a way to defend itself. Love stops to get absorbed. It doesn’t have an agenda. It doesn’t have an argument to win. It just lands on a person and says, hey, I’m here if you need me. How and when the love gets absorbed just depends on how thick their skin is. But no where in the Bible does it say to give up.
Do everything, everything, in love.