Ever feel like people are using the right word in the wrong way?
Like love.
As Christians we are supposed to be all about “loving” our neighbor, but love like that makes us uncomfortable. It means having open arms to all the wrong sorts of people. To people that culture, particularly our Christian sub-culture, have told us are our enemies.
But the things about enemies is, we are supposed to love them too.
Even enemies are at the same time neighbors who we are called to love. Which we know, but we don’t always like or know how to fit into the way we live out our faith.
So we redefine our terms, we redefine love. Love which is supposed to be about loving others as we love ourselves becomes something else. It becomes something that doesn’t look much like love at all.
We call it love, we insist that what we are doing is loving, but if our neighbor approached us the same way we would never call it loving.
People become targets or projects to us, and in the process we no longer are treating them as fellow humans. We are not treating them in a way which we would call love if the tables were turned.
Not that we shouldn’t “speak the truth in love” as it were, but when that love only exists to leverage a hearing for the truth… maybe it wasn’t really love at all.
