all you need is love
I've been thinking a bunch lately about the idea of loving people. My questions have direct implications to my job in student government at Fuller, and the reality that not everyone comes from the same contextual framework of grace and love. It's funny at times how flippantly we toss this word, love, around in the Christian world. It seems that in the midst of knowing and trusting that God's love for people bridges the broken link between a Savior and the saved, we often lose the art of actually looking at what love is, and what its role is in our lives.
But I wonder how often as a church we look at love beyond the Hollywood definitions. Beyond the teddy-bear, warm-fuzzy. The implications in my life lately are two-fold: I'm realizing more and more than I cannot love others if I do not in fact care for and love myself. There are, of course, numerous implications: sleeping appropriately, giving myself enough time to really digest and follow-through on a paper, having hard conversations, saying " to a party where all my friends will be. And secondarily, simply defining what love means.
The church seems to think that love equals grace, and grace equals mercy. Call me a fool, but the last time I checked the definitions of these words, while hey certainly are similar to some degree, are not the same words which are being defined practically and theoretically in different ways. Sometimes mercy means permitting someone an extension on a paper. Sometimes it means teaching a lesson about time-management. Is one unloving and the other not? No. Sometimes grace means even when hurt by a friend, extending your hand of peace out. Sometimes grace means telling a friend struggling with an addiction to pornography that s/he must seek help. Is it ungracious and unloving to tell the addicted person to stop? No.
So lately I've been faced with the question of when does grace allow a person to keep on behaving in an unhealthy manner, and when must a foot be put down. When must I graciously accept hurtful behavior and show mercy? When is mercy different from grace? Is one of those responses not love and the other actually love? Is it loving and grace-giving to allow an addict to continue doing because we don't want to have a hard conversation? Certainly not. But it seems that the church is a bit more concerned with what others will think than for the good of the individual. Our eyes seem rather clouded, and I'm fearing the branch is about to break off.
It might seem discontinuous with other thinking lately, and especially to write about on a prospective student blog - but here's the thrux of what I want to convey. It's not easy to ask questions, but I am thankful that some of the diversity in theology at Fuller allows me to really think about these things.