Misunderstandings yet Love

One of the worst things that someone can go through is trying to do the right thing but yet be ultimately blamed as the scapegoat for all the trouble.

Sometimes the human heart is a hard thing to grasp. Love is a complicated, but yet seemingly so simple concept. Imagine loving someone very much only to have that person turn the tables on you. You went out on a limb for this person, you took shots for this person, everything you tried to do was be there for them.

And to have that individual spit venom in your face is an unfortunate event to occur.

Even through this, we must learn how to love people that don't have our best interests at heart. This includes for those that persecute us, talk crap behind our backs, and those who dislike us very much so.

The difference between liking and loving is that love is a choice we make; a choice to die to ourselves, our pride, our ego. Liking someone is based off emotion.

It's easy to love someone that you like, it's even harder to love someone who doesn't like you at all or even hate you. It would be easy to hate those that hate you. But Gandhi put it most favorably when he stated,"An eye for an eye, makes the whole world blind."

However, this concept is one that is hard to grasp, let alone embody. However, we are called to a higher standard than what the world has set before us. To help our cause, we have something not of this world, but the Spirit. It is with the Spirit that all things are possible.

Regardless of what one would like to think about love and liking it's a hard topic to act upon. I read something that a dear friend wrote and I think it has its uses in this entry.

So I reached down deep inside and gave him a pearl of wisdom that I myself have a hard time believing... I told him that love isn't always about insisting upon your own way. Sometimes it's about trust. But mostly, love is really about knowing in your deepest soul that someone cares for you and has your best interest at heart, even if you can't quite understand it right then.

In all this, we are called to love each other, not like. If that was the case, Jesus would have instructed us to like one another, instead of loving one another. However, let's take what the world's definition of love is and draw it out even farther.

One of the hardest things in the world is to lay yourself down for someone you love while they persecute you. In admist all this, it's hard to pray constantly for this person hoping that their heart would change, when human instinct tells you that it's no use.

John 15:13 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

This does not just mean laying down your physical life for your friends, but laying it all down, even when the odds are stacked up against you. Prayer admist circumstances that have little to no hope in them of a persons heart changing. That my friends requires true and genuine faith.

Lastly I would like to conclude with the obvious; circumstances like these are so frustrating. I believe Martin Luther King Jr. had it right when he stated,"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will."