love v. 2.0

4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Cor. 13:4-7

So to continue the blog series in trying to understand how to love others - love is not easily angered, and keeps no record of wrongs.

Yeah, right, are you kidding?

I used this analogy with someone recently. Being hurt or disappointed is kind of like swimming in the ocean and getting stung by a jellyfish. Once you've been stung, there is an immediate fear of recurrence, and an aversion to re-entering the ocean. Some may eventually conquer their fear and go back - some may not.

But even for those who do, it's inevitable that they will have a reaction - whether it be conscious or not - to the first jellyfish they see upon their return. Some may react to all jellyfish - after all, it's become obvious that jellyfish are capable of stinging. Some may give the species the benefit of the doubt...but what if they saw the same jellyfish that had stung them before? At best, their guard will be up and they will be wary and stay a comfortable distance away. At worst, they will strike pre-emptively and attack first, to protect themselves from potential harm. Fight or flight - you know it.

So as I think about what love is (cue Night at th e Roxbury soundtrack - baby don't hurt me indeed) - I realize that truly loving others means forgiving. And not just the brush-it-under-the-rug forgiveness of letting things pass or subside. But a full forgiveness that means if the exact same thing happened again, your reaction wouldn't be any more severe than when it happened the first time.

It's kind of like an infected computer. Every time something happens to you, your heart puts a little cookie to remember said incident. Well, over the course of time, you get a lot of cookies. A lot of spyware. A lot of "stuff" that gets in the way and redirects the paths so that your processor is freakishly slow - all to say that it's not functioning at the capacity that it was made for. So in order to restore the original settings and get your computer working again, you defragment your hard drive. Wipe out the unnecessary cookies.

The phrase 'forgive and forget' may be trite, and most people may claim to have done it, but...can you really just wipe the slate clean? l would venture to say no. We're human, and we didn't evolve by being stupid. (And by evolve I mean micro not macroevolution - imho, creation still stands, but so does survival of the fittest, capitalism, and all that). Even little kids learn fast - if I touch a hot stove, my hand hurts. Maybe I shouldn't touch it again.

That's a pretty crazy notion. It's knowing that the pot will be hot, the jellyfish may sting you - and choosing to touch the pot, swim with the jellyfish, and love people as though they haven't ever disappointed you. But what examples we have - God with the loser Israelites, Hosea with Gomer, Jesus with his disciples who abandoned him...it's impossible. It's superhuman.

And it is indeed superhuman. When things happen to you, they plant seeds of fear. And there is no amount of self-convincing that will really take away that gut reaction of turning away. After I had my nose busted and bloodied at a tournament once - it took me quite awhile to stop

18There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. 19We love because he first loved us. -1 John 4:18-19

A wise old staffer once said to me "if fear causes you to sway one way - go the other way. God wouldn't want you to be afraid." (And by fear he meant timid fear, not holy fear - another topic for another time).

As I study each aspect, I realize how counter-intuitive it is. So all this is to say that I have a lot to learn about loving people. But the hope (another catch phrase of said staffer) is to understand and to grow.

Maybe we were meant to swim with jellyfish.

Maybe we are the jellyfish.