Love God, Love People (Remastered)

We're living in a world that keeps breaking

But if we want to find a way to change it

It all comes down to this

Love God, love people ~ Danny Gokey, "Love God, Love People"

I initially wrote a post based off of this song in August of last year. While much has changed in the 14 months since then, unfortunately, many people are still having trouble loving others the way we are called to. In fact, I feel like some people are less loving now than they were then. As Christians, our priority should always be loving others the way Christ has loved us. Going back to the roadmap presented in 1 Corinthians 13, here are some of the areas I've noticed still need a bit of work.

Love is kind: The member of our monthly circle group I mentioned in the original post finally came back to our group in April. Mom and I enjoyed spending time with her and catching up on the last year. That was, of course, until the subject of the shot came up. She asked Mom and me if we had gotten it, and we honestly said we had not. After our admission, she started acting very squirrely. She turned her body away from us and quickly cleaned up her stuff and left. While I thought her behavior was a bit odd, I did notice that it was almost 7:00 and thought that she might have had another meeting to be at. That is until she refused to come back in May, and has continued to do so every month since. In doing so, she is proving to us what we had suspected for a while: spending time cultivating our friendship is not a priority for her. 

Mom and I are still the same people we were before the pandemic, and we are more than willing to accept this person back into our group when and if she decides to return. We are committed to being kind to her even if she is choosing not to be kind to us.  

Love is not boastful/proud: The main violation I have seen related to this is the prevalence of "shot selfies." Someone posts a picture after receiving one of the shots and talks about how wonderful they are for doing so, and sometimes even calls for others to get the shot so that they can be wonderful people too. The implication in some of these posts is that not getting the shot makes a person horrible and inconsiderate. Many people have valid reasons for not getting the shot, and those who have gotten it acting as if they are better people than those who haven't is not going to change anyone's minds. I see this entitled mentality among many of those who have gotten the shot as one of the biggest social tragedies of the past year.

Love honors others: An executive order has created a vaccine mandate for a large number of companies and public service industries across the country. These companies are left with the choice of forcing all of their employees to receive the shot or losing federal funding or contracts. This mandate is dishonoring in many ways. It dishonors hardworking employees that have opted not to get the shot for one reason or another, forcing them to do something they don't believe in or could potentially harm them. Once many of these employees either quit or are fired, it dishonors the customers because they can no longer be served as well by the company because the company no longer has enough personnel to do their job well. This could lead to the company disintegrating, which dishonors the work they do.

One place where this lack of honor is playing out en masse is New York City, where police officers, firefighters, EMTs, and even garbagemen are required to get the shot or lose their jobs. This dishonors the people in the city because losing any of these workers puts the people of the city in danger. Nine thousand of these workers are already on unpaid leave. This means that fires will burn longer, criminals will not be caught, people will wait longer for medical care, and trash will pile up. This lack of honor could easily prove much more deadly than the virus itself.

Love is not self-seeking: I mentioned in the original post that the main place I saw this was Facebook comments, and that continues to be the case now. In fact, this problem has only gotten worse since then. Comments have gone from simply inconsiderate to pure evil. About a year ago, I posted something about fear projection, which is when people react in anger when they are feeling afraid.  Since the post mentioned the debate between people who are for masks and people who are against them, both people that commented focused solely on trying to prove that they were not afraid of people not wearing masks and totally ignored the point I was trying to make by sharing it.

I responded to one of them and said that I wasn't accusing him of being afraid, but I was instead imploring everyone to be aware of what fear might be living below the surface. Instead of acknowledging that he had misinterpreted my intentions, he again vehemently denied his fear. The viciousness in his response caused me to delete his comments and post a separate comment to my post explaining my reasoning for sharing it. Since then, he has continued to comment on my posts in a similarly vicious manner, which has completely destroyed our friendship.

Another example I saw was on a post a friend shared about feeling overwhelmed caring for her three young children. One person jokingly told her to just wait until they were teenagers, which, although ill-timed, did not deserve the response it got from the friend's husband. He accused her of belittling his wife's experience and was just overall vicious toward her. I came close to messaging him and calling him out for his behavior. That scathing condemnation of a lighthearted comment was completely uncalled for in such a public setting. Commenting like he did rather than addressing his concerns privately with the person was very self-seeking, and really hurt my opinion of him.

Love is not easily angered/keeps no record of wrongs: I finally broke down and messaged the former friend first mentioned in Unvaccinated and Unafraid to ask him why he unfriended me. He responded that he did it because I kept sharing posts that were "morally and factually wrong". After reading his response, I looked back at the things I had shared prior to discovering he had unfriended me. Even though he unfriended me in August and I scrolled back to January, I couldn't figure out what he saw as morally wrong. I can only conclude that I was right in the assessment of the situation I made in Easily Offendable: he got offended by something I posted and unfriended me in a rush of anger rather than just scrolling by.

He also mentioned that I deleted comments on posts. While this is true, it has not happened since March, and as I said before, he did not unfriend me until August. If indeed this was part of his reasoning, he was keeping a record of wrongs against me for five whole months before he unfriended me. He probably thought I was still doing it because I had turned off comments on some of my posts, so they didn't have any.

What he doesn't seem to realize is that deleting those comments, and then not allowing new ones, is my way of not keeping a record of wrongs. I didn't delete every comment on my posts that I didn't agree with, just the ones that were not respectful. Keeping those comments would cause me to continue to get angry every time I saw them, and would color my opinion of the people that posted them. Since some of those comments came from people I see often, being reminded of them could cause problems when we interact in person. (Incidentally, that was part of the reason he gave for unfriending me, but that action has actually come closer to having the opposite effect.)

Love doesn't delight in evil: I have seen a few violations of this aspect of love. People have called for hospitals to stop treating people who haven't gotten the shot, and some hospitals are actually doing so. I've also seen posts expressing a desire to see all people who have not gotten the shot contracting Covid, and some people even want them to die of it. There used to be things that we wouldn't wish on our worst enemy, and now people are wishing this on their friends and family! Granted, these people may not realize that they are wishing this fate on people they know and love, but that doesn't make it okay. Truly loving others means wishing them the best no matter what. Remember that on the cross, Jesus prayed for those who were killing Him. 

Love rejoices in the truth: As I mentioned earlier, part of why I lost a good friend recently was because he saw me as "factually wrong". For a while now, there has been an increasing trend of denying facts that people don't agree with, and the past year has heightened it to a dangerous crescendo. Truth doesn't cease to be true just because we don't like it. We need to be willing to accept the truth so that we can spend less time arguing about the facts and more time loving those around us.

Love never fails: While there have been people in my life who have given up on me in the past year, I refuse to give up on them. When they are willing to set aside their pride and repent, I will gladly accept them back into my life. Until that time, I will continue to pray for them. The pandemic has caused quite a few interpersonal problems, and I am committed to being part of the solution.