Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Loving People You Don't Like

How do you love people you don't like, or people that you don't feel comfortable with?

It's easy to love people I like. Especially the people who believe God's grace like I do. But how do you love the people who scare you or make you feel uncomfortable? What about people who annoy you? People who always want to hang out and you don't really like them. I've tried this before and there is a complete inability for ME to do it. I asked God today to love the people I don't like through me. Because honestly, in my own capacity to love, loving someone unconditionally is absolutely impossible.

I think another thing that hinders my building relationships with people is that they wanna DO stuff. They want me to hang out with them! lol I hate going outside my comfort zone. I wanna love the people I like..and even that can be hard.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said it's impossible. I, you, we can't do it in and of ourselves. I'd even say that loving the people we like is also impossible, because real unconditional love doesn't love based upon like or unlike of a person. :) And so it goes back to what you said about wanting God to love people through us.

I think this means resting in Christ and focusing on Him and not on the externals of the people around us. Hard, I know. :) Or, rather, impossible. Like you and I have talked about before (I think), we can't make resting in Christ just another 'work' to work on.

I'm with you on all this. I want to love people unconditionally too. And it must be agape love and so it must be Agape Himself in and through us.

Mattityahu said...

Amen to that. I constantly find myself not being able to agape even the people I love. I think maybe the first thing we need to learn to do when faced with this reality is to submit to God's righteousness and quit trying to establish our own righteousness by beating ourselves up when we fail in order to teach ourselves to love. It makes it even more impossible to love unconditonally when we can't receive unconditional love for ourselves.

Bino M. said...

This is a struggle in my life. I find it hard to love the people who don't believe what I believe. Especially the ones I shared the Gospel and still don't accept it. I know it is my pride and ego. I wish I have a loving heart! That tells me, if there is any ounce of love in me, that is from Christ Jesus!

Mattityahu said...

Right on, Bino. I can completely relate. It's easy for me to distance myself from people who don't believe things the way I do and to hide from them. I feel like an outsider sometimes. Like I'm the goat and they're the sheep.