All We Need is Love
When love is absent or corrupted, as it is in our culture, the result is strife, alienation, and even murderous rampages like the one at Virginia Tech. Parents and mentors who love children can significantly reduce alienation and resentment, , but many still grow up without the clarity and certainty of love necessary for healthy maturity. They become depressed or angry loners who may harm themselves or others. At the least, they continue the expansion of a part of the culture of those who fail at relationships and are never able to enjoy the blessings of emotional or healthy physical intimacy. Since some differences are normal for everyone, and since those least loved tend to handle conflict the worst, the need for peacemakers is great.
At the same time, the effects of self-centered narcissism on children produce individuals who have no peace. Their depression and anger or worse are symptoms of an inner turmoil that often prompts external expression, everything from an Alec Baldwin berating his daughter to a madman killing little girls. As important as developing loving relationships, especially between parents and their children to nurture healthy individual, is bringing peace to the lives of those whose circumstances have led to unhealthy attitudes.
What is a peacemaker? When I use the word, I refer to a person who facilitates positive interaction between people with a dispute serious enough to keep them from communicating. A peacemaker recognizes the dynamics of conflict. After an initial difference of opinion, unless parties have agreed respectfully to disagree, continued conflict is a contest of selfish wills. In so many cases, where love should be, war-making replaces love, respect, and even cordiality for those whom they should have positive regard. The increasing contentiousness of American culture is evident in court dockets crowded with lawsuits, elections turned ugly by vicious attacks on opponents, families ripped apart by irreconcilable differences (when it's the people who refuse to reconcile), cutthroat business tactics, athletes who will do anything to win and get rich, and street violence. All that fighting represents both a frightening problem and an awesome opportunity. Our families, our nation, and our world need peacemakers, people who learn to resolve differences in their own lives, use their skills to bring peace into the lives of others, and thereby discover the lessons, insights, and creativity to broker peace in the broader conflicts. Inherent to peacemaking is the choice to love rather than be selfish with the understanding that win/win solutions achieved via mutual respect, negotiation and collaboration will endure while win/lose solutions solve nothing and maintain conflict, even to horrible expressions of violence.
Churches and families, especially, need the disciplines of making and keeping the peace. Churches, more than any other place, given their stewardship of divine principles, should be places of peace; yet often they are communities of perpetual bickering, division, bitterness, and contests for power. Christian fellowships ought to be oases of peace, created by grace, mercy, forgiveness, patience, reconciliation, unity, and love. Communities of faith should be models of respect, harmony, and cooperation so that families may learn to survive and prosper.
No child is better off with divorced and separated parents. Selfishness and refusing to reconcile disagreements cause most divorce. Jesus said that Moses permitted divorce because human hearts were hard (Matthew 19:8). Parents who love each other convey love to their children; divorce inevitably means love lost, leads to guilt and fear in children who cannot comprehend it, and, even when undeniably necessary (due to abuse, for example), is difficult for all concerned. Yet, virtually no one who marries imagines "falling out of love." Usually, they don't imagine that the person they love so much may some day seem like a stranger with strange, seemingly incompatible ideas. Then is the time that peacemakers and churches of peace must bring the lessons of love to replace the instincts of war. To start, perhaps their only point of agreement may be the “best interests” of their children, and unfortunately many couples lose even that bit of decency in the battling that is common during divorce proceedings.
Christians[1] must love. Here is the bottom line, the final thought, and the unavoidable necessity. Evil will always be a part of human experience until God removes it. Sinners will always commit sins to please themselves until a greater purpose rules their lives. For some, that purpose is a marriage partner or a baby. For others, it may come as a heart-wrenching awareness of human need. Ultimately, only divine love can displace human self-centeredness; without it every other effort will fall short.
Tragedies like a deranged man massacring 32 students and teachers, a father killing other men’s daughters, a mother drowning her own children, and teenagers murdering their classmates horrify us, and we want to "do something." Sadly, we seem less troubled by the many suicides among the young. Horrors caused by human evil are actually rather common—terrorism, ethnic cleansing, religious war, teen suicide, child abuse, rape and incest, gang violence, domestic assault, racist terrorizing, stalking, serial murder, school shootings. Some say the Qu’ran commands killing infidels who will not convert, but Christians, without Biblical authority, have also done violence in the name of their religion. Man's inhumanity to man is puzzling; a religious person's cruelty in God's name is unfathomable, except to see that it has more to do with the person's wishes than God's[2].
Love is an almost universal virtue. Most religions teach it, none more clearly or centrally than Christianity. Egotism expressed in greed, gluttony, lust, coveting, murder, hatred, and pride is almost universally regarded as vice. Yet American and Western culture have subtly embraced the vice and rejected the virtue, producing frustration, loss, and a clear lack of inner peace. The government and other social institutions will not change until the people who control them or benefit from them change. Only God and His people offer any real hope of bringing that change.
I have heard Christian leaders suggest that the answer is spiritual, and I agree…with caution. The critical factor is love, and the gospel, spiritual instruction, and religious values must be conveyed in love[3]. That means the faithful must practice everything that God says about love. The act of evangelizing or proclaiming truth, alone, is not a sufficient demonstration of love, because people will not recognize it to be love. To reach people and for them to believe the message, they must trust the messenger[4]. To trust a messenger, people must sense a messenger's genuine compassion and concern. The messenger’s words and actions must show love above all.
In love is hope. The problem is enormous. The price for failure is unacceptable. We want someone to do something, but no one seems to know what. God is God and can do as He wills. So, what can I do? What is one person against a situation of such depth and magnitude? We might just as well grab a beer, turn on the TV, and find a way not to think about anything. That will be the response for most. Others will talk and talk and talk but still do nothing.
Please, friend, do something. The opportunities surround you, from your family, through your neighborhood, to your church, and throughout the world. Love someone, then another, and another. Love is powerful. Love is redemptive. God is love, and to love is to bring God into the lives of the people you love, and even more into your own life. People are love-starved, today; they will respond to your love, IF IT IS LOVE! Love your children and they will thrive. Love anyone's kids and they will be transformed. Love your neighbor and you will gain a friend. Love your wife and she will glow. Love your husband and he will crow (sorry, I'm a preacher). Love a stranger and the strangeness will fade. Love your enemy and your war may end.
If you’re not a Christian, if you have never trusted Jesus Christ to be your savior, and have never accepted the gift of grace paid for in His blood because of His love, then may I offer you the opportunity? To the extent that words can show, I make this invitation because I truly care about you. This is the path to something truly amazing—the freedom of God’s forgiveness, the chance to experience unconditional love, and the foundation for expanding your capacity to love. The entrance to the path is nothing more than faith in an infinitely compassionate but intimately accessible God. He is only a prayer away.
Jesus changed the world, starting with 12. We have available the same power to transform, now as then. We must use it. We dare not allow our comfort and complacent self-interest to prevent the love that God has given us to share from its task, or not only will there be more tragedies, but the next one may be in our own back yard.
[1] I am a Christian by faith. To me it is more than a religious system of beliefs and rituals, but a relationship with God based on His rescuing me through the atoning death of Christ, not on my self-deliverance. In this, I believe, most religion plays to human self-centeredness and pride, as man makes himself (or herself) worthy of God. In the gospel, man humbly accepts God's declaration of love and His sovereign provision to which the only response is faith, obedience, gratitude, and love. I believe that it is this "breaking" of human pride that makes the building of selfless love possible. However, I will not deny that human effort can, especially as a part of religious discipline, contribute to the changes I have been discussing here.
[2] God does destroy evil and people firmly enslaved by evil. We must be very careful about assuming God's role in divine judgment of evil. Killing in war or as punishment for murder might best be accompanied with a powerful reluctance and deep regret by soldier or jurist or rejected altogether. "Vengeance is mine," says the Lord. Our job is forgiveness, mercy, peace, and reconciliation. We have some obligation to justice, but we must recognize our limits and never allow justice to justify violence or other evil.
[3] Paul was absolutely clear about this in I Corinthians 13; without love, every kind of religious expression, ritual, and practice is empty and worthless!
[4] This appears to be one of the biggest mistakes Christians make in dealing with Muslims. Too often even the words Christian and Christianity have come to imply a superior attitude that Muslims instinctively reject. I believe the Bible is truth, the very Word of God, and I believe the Qu’ran is not. However, if I say that to a Muslim, I will only offend him and never be able to introduce him to Christ. Arrogance is not love.
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