Before I move into what love isn’t, I do want to mention a couple more things about what love is.

Love is a Choice

Agape love is a choice. In John 13:34, Jesus commanded his followers to love others (agape) as he loved them. This would not have been a command if it were just a spontaneous feeling that was not a choice. We can love everyone. The person that we have the most difficulty loving marks the limits of our love for everyone. For me, Donald Trump has been one of the most difficult people I’ve ever tried to love. So that I know that if anyone behaved like him, I would likewise have the same difficulty.

C.S. Lewis argued in his book, Mere Christianity, that if you behave as if you love someone, treating them as love demands, then genuine love will ensue.

Putting Others Above Yourself in the Mundane

Previously I wrote about the ultimate proof of agape love, giving up your life for someone else. But in the mundane areas of life, the same qualities of love can be exhibited by treating others as more important than yourself in conversations. Do you listen to their stories? Are you thinking about how what they are saying makes them feel? Do you hope for the best for them, encouraging them with positive feedback (the same way you love positive feedback)?

The basis that many give for the organized church is Hebrews 10:25 . . . not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

The point of that verse is not the requirement that Christians meet on a regular basis, but encouraging each other on a regular basis. At the time it was written, Christians were a persecuted minority. But encouragement is essential for all of us.

I have a fear of walking into a church, especially where there is any kind of discussion, because of the thirty years of being attacked, sometimes brutally. The sad thing is that the attackers are a small minority, while the majority are encouragers and kind people. I know that’s not fair to the majority.

Some Christians, in the pursuit of personal piety, see themselves as God’s thought police. This has driven away many people from the organized church. This is profoundly unloving. The other sad thing is that most of the “God’s thought police” that I have known base their attacks on what they assume I mean, not trying to understand what I actually said.

You can and should criticize ideas, which I often do, but making it personal is unloving. I’ve tried to never make my criticism personal, such as: “You believe x, therefore you are a very bad person, a hater of God.”

Personal attacks can be devastating but I’ve also known how one compliment can make my day, my week, my month.

Love is always using words of encouragement, even if you don’t totally agree with someone. Knowing the value of encouragement, toward the end of my career, I tried to say something positive to each of my patients, “You’ve worked so hard on this!” “You are a great mother!” “Most would have given up before now!”

Love Imitators

Eros

One of the most obvious ones is eros. Eros is the Greek word for romantic or sexual love. When people “fall in love,” this is what they are talking about. Eros certainly has its place, the spice of life. It is a powerful feeling, but it can be selfish and against agape love.

My typical patient for my 38-year career working with headaches, mostly migraine, were women in the prime of their lives. I heard horrible story after horrible story of how they and their husbands or boyfriends fell so much in love, but then that person treats them horribly. Mental abuse and sometime physical abuse.

When I was an evangelical, I witnessed the psychological abuse that some men, under the auspices of “a Biblical mandate for the husband to lead,” did to their wives. The worst was a couple that came to a house church that I started. This man treated his wife like a beaten slave. In the end, he was so controlling that she was not allowed to speak to anyone unless he was in the room. He also would “spank” her if she got out of line, seeing himself as God’s discipliner. He was a lunatic, and I was the devil in his eyes for calling him out on it.

Harmony

If the conservative church errors on the side of being thought police, cultural warriors, and allowing their concept of patriarchal authority to turn into spousal abuse, on the progressive side, I believe the pursuit of harmony has replaced agape.

In the progressive church, by avoiding divisive issues, pretending all beliefs are the same, the hope is to secure peace and harmony. But I will say this for the hundredth time, Jesus says that harmony and peace are built on love and respect, not agreement. You cannot create the idea that all views are the same without giving up the concept of truth, which is a disaster. It is a false dichotomy to think that different opinions on important issues must lead to strife.

I’ve told the story before, but when I lived in Egypt, my best friend was a fundamentalist Muslim. I would have taken a bullet for him, and he for me. But we had totally different views. No, we did not become friends by agreeing that Islam and Christianity were the same. We had many discussions about the big differences between our perspectives. But our friendship was built on love, not agreement.

I will never try to start a church again because I don’t have the gifts. If I started a church, training for the congregation would involve studying why we believe in God in the first place. I would expose people to the best anti-God lectures of atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I ended my own doubts by thinking honestly, not by hiding from the debate. I’ve listened to hours of the atheists’ attacks, and I always come away with the feeling, “That’s all you got?”

I would have training classes for the church on The Theology of Trumpism. I would do it knowing that half were devoted to Donald Trump and half, like me, think he’s the devil. But you can only do that if you have a foundation of unconditional (agape) love.

Harmony for the sake of harmony is cheap love. Seek agape, unconditional love, and the world becomes a better place. There is absolute truth, not all views are the same. One absolute truth is that love can change the world.

Respectfully,

Mike