"It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen.
Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so.
You feel like running, but life is on a stroll.
This is how God does things...
My realization came while attending an alumni social...Greg Spencer, a communications professor was to speak...The lecture was about the power of metaphor. Spencer opened by asking us what metaphors we think of when we consider the topic of cancer. We gave him our answers, all pretty much the same, we battle cancer, we fight cancer, we are rebuilding our white blood cells, things like that. Spencer pointed out that the overwhelming majority of metaphors proceeded to talk about cancer patients and how, because of war metaphor, many people who suffer with cancer feel more burdened than, in fact, they should. Most of them are frightened beyond their need to be frightened, and this affects their health. Some, feeling that they have been thrust into a deadly war, simply give up. If there were another metaphor, a metaphor more accurate, perhaps cancer would not prove so deadly...Because of war metaphor, we are more likely to fear cancer when, actually, most people survive the disease...
Mr. Spencer then asked us about another area in which he felt metaphors cause trouble. He asked us to consider relationships. What metaphors do we use when we think of relationships? We value people, I shouted out. Yes, he said, and wrote it on his little white board. We invest in people, another person added. And soon enough we had listed an entire white board of economic metaphor. Relationships could be bankrupt, we said. People are priceless, we said. All economic metaphor. I was taken aback...
And that's when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dislodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. Professor Spencer was right, and not only was he right, I felt as though he had cured me, as though he has let me out of my cage. I could see it very clearly. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless.
I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years.
I used love like money.
The church used love like money.
With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did...
I used love like money, but love doesn’t work like money.
It is not a commodity.
When we barter with it, we all lose.
When the church does not love its enemies, it fuels their rage. It makes them hate us more...
I replaced economic metaphor, in my mind, with something different, a free gift metaphor or a magnet metaphor. That is, instead of withholding love to change somebody, I poured it on, lavishly.
I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the mire and toward healing...Here is something very simple about relationships that Spencer helped me discover: Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.
After I repented, things were different, but the difference wasn't with my friend, the difference was with me.
I was happy.
Before, I had all this negative tension flipping around in my gut, all this judgmentalism and pride and loathing of other people.
I hated it, and now I was set free.
I was free to love.
I didn't have to discipline anybody, I didn't have to judge anybody, I could treat everybody as though they were my best friend, as though they were rock stars or famous poets, as though they were amazing, and to me they became amazing...
When I am talking to somebody there are always two conversations going on.
The first is on the surface; it is about politics or music or whatever it is our mouths are saying. The other is beneath the surface, on the level of the heart, and my heart is either communicating that I like the person I am talking to or I don't.
God wants both conversations to be true.
That is, we are supposed to speak truth in love.
If both conversations are not true, God is not involved in the exchange, we are on our own, and on our own, we will lead people astray.
The Bible says that if you talk to somebody with your mouth, and your heart does not love them, that you are like a person standing there smashing two cymbals together. You are only annoying everybody around you. I think that is very beautiful and true.....
Television drives me crazy sometimes because everybody is so good-looking, and yet you walk through the aisles of the grocery stores, and nobody looks like that...America is one of the most immoral countries in the world and our media has reduced humans to slabs of meat. And there will always be this tension while I live in this country because none of this will ever change.
Ani Difranco, in her song "32 Flavors," says that she is a poster girl with no poster, she is 32 flavors and then some, and she is beyond our peripheral vision, so we might want to turn our heads, because some day we're gonna get hungry and eat all of the words we just said.
And just about everybody I know loves those lines because they speak of heaven and of hope and the idea that some day a King will come and dictate, through some mystical act of love, an existence in which everybody has to eat their own words because we won't be allowed to judge each other on the surface of things anymore.
And this fills me with hope.
Jean-Paul Sartre said hell is other people...Ravi Zacharias says that heaven can be other people, too, and that we have the power to bring a little of heaven into the lives of others every day...
My friend Julie from Seattle says the key to everything rests in the ability to receive love, and what she says is right because my personal experience tells me so...
The sentiment was simple: Love your neighbor as yourself.
And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it.
When you get it, it changes you.
Julie told me that the main prayer she prays for her husband is that he will be able to receive love.
And this is the prayer I pray for all of my friends because it is the key to happiness.
God's love will never change us if we don't accept it."
Posts
