Guilt-Free Love

I heard a song on the Muzak system at work today. The lyrics of the song are:
"All I need is the air that I breathe and to love you. All I need is the air that I breathe, yes to love you."

My first thought was, "Jesus, I wish it were that simple!" If I could just be real for a moment, it is not easy to love people. In fact, some days it can take all of your strength (and air, according to that songwriter) to love someone. No one is exempt from this. Your best friend in the whole wide world, your mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, other Christians, co-worker - all of them will get on your last nerve from time to time. It may be unintentionally, but it was your last good nerve just the same and they managed to destroy it. If you're anything like me, you feel this tremendous amount of guilt for not loving them in those moment. You feel like the worst person alive because you can't stand the people who love you back.

As Christians, we are instructed to love others. Romans 12:9 states, "Don't just pretend to love other others. Really love them. Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good." At first glance, this verse made me feel even worse because of the 'pretend' part. Sometimes I feel like I'm pretending my love for others, which I thought was OK to do only because of the saying, "Fake it until you make it." I thought if I faked my love for them eventually it would turn into real love...and that didn't happen at least for me. If you have a success story, please share. I thought about it and I would be terribly hurt if I found out one of my love ones was pretending to love me. That would be like finding out someone only dated me because of my looks or the amount of money I have. I don't need fake love and neither do the people around me. So what can we do in order not to fake love others? You can work on having guilt-free love for others.

I was driving back from Pittsburgh yesterday and the term, guilt-free love, came to me. Guilt-free love is loving someone and knowing that you have done everything you can for that person. It is loving them despite any harsh and/or unspoken feelings you have toward them. It's having a clear mind about the way you show your love to them and really being after someone's best interest. It is hard to love others when they are:

• Annoying
• Negative
• Never in your corner
• Misunderstand everything that you say
• Conceited
• Successful
• Lying or stealing from you
• Clearly displaying ulterior motives for being in your life.
  

Getting past these things and loving others is not easy. A few years ago it hit me that I had a lot of guilt about how I was loving and not loving the people in my life. At that time, I decided to do something about it. I started with one relationship. I thought of one person in my life I needed to love better and in this instance, really love them and stop pretending. I listed all of the things I felt guilty of in regards to the way that I loved them. In this relationship, we had a poor communication problem, so it was difficult to talk to them and we fought often. On my end, one of the reasons for the poor communication is because after a while, I hardly picked up the phone when they called. Some of the times it was intentional, but after a while, I knew what I was doing and felt how wrong it. My first challenge to myself was to begin picking up the phone when they called and sure enough, about a week after making this promise to God, I was tested. I'm happy to report I passed. It took more than one phone call to develop this relationship, but step one had to be accomplished first. I had to want to give them real love. Today, I talk this person when they call and also call them from time to time. But please understand, this took time. Please note that 90% of the testimonies I share with you are not over night successes.

The devil hates when people get along and have unity. He loves to turn our lives into a paternity suit episode of Maury Povich, complete with the chair throwing and someone running away crying. I'm learning to like it when the devil hates me because it means I am making better decisions and really loving others around me. Please pray about that one relationship in your life that you need to repair. I pray that you all can be the givers and recipients of guilt-free love.