Love and Like

Greg McKenzie wrote the following recently:

I've heard that love is a verb, not a feeling. It's something we do, a choice we make. That's an important thing to understand if you plan to love your enemy, or even just your neighbor. This jives well with the other proverb I've heard. I don't have to like you, I just have to love you. I guess that liking in that scenario is the feeling and love is the doing. The point is, we must choose to act in love even in the absence of positive feelings toward others.

I wonder, though, if the real force of Christian teaching isn't undermined by the idea of loving without liking. Looking at myself, suspicion arises when the enormous feeling of relief follows the realization. I can still despise you? Loath you? All I have to do is take the moral high road and treat you nice? Whew, that was a close one. Now, I'll admit, treating an enemy with love is no small thing. But somehow it's not as hard if I don't have to stop feeling disgust, scorn, resentment or animosity.

Maybe that is the sense of Jesus' comparison of murder with anger, insult, and contempt. Maybe it's not so easy to compartmentalize emotion and action. Maybe like is a verb too.

Great thoughts. Here is what I added:

I think like follows love. That is why love is first. Often I will not love someone if I have to like them first. When I truly love, I then come to like the person that fear, prejudice and ignorance once prevented me from liking. As I grow in Christ I desire to have a smaller gap between loving and liking. Someday I may even approach being like Jesus in the ability to love and like at the same time.

May you find someone more likable today. See them as Jesus sees them. Live for Him, show the world that he is still among us.

Song of the Day:
Emmanuel, God With Us
Amy Grant

Dedicated to Robbie Goldman

We dim the light.
We stoke the fire.
We breathe the evergreen.
Young ones wait
While the old ones make up
Tales of how it used to be.

China dolls,
Candy corn,
Painted wooden toys,
Treasures found
To the wondrous sound
Of carolling the savior
Born to us on christmas morn.

Emmanuel, God with us,
Emmanuel!
Emmanuel, God with us,
The son of Israel

And still he calls
Through the night,
Beyond the days of old.
A voice of peace
To the weary ones,
Who struggle with the human soul.

All of us,
Travellers,
Through a given time.
Who can know
What tomorrow holds?
But over the horizon,
Surely you and I will find.

Emmanuel, God with us,
Emmanuel!
Emmanuel, God with us,
The son of israel.

And the years they come,
And the years they go,
Though we may forget somehow
That the child once born in bethlehem
Is still among us now.

Emmanuel, God with us, (emmanuel.)
Emmanuel! (emmanuel.)
Emmanuel, God with us, (emmanuel.)
The son of israel. (israel.)
The son of israel.
The son of is...israel. (son of israel.)