30 Day Challenge; Day 11

Day 11: Something you Feel Strongly About

William Gladstone is the original author of this quote. Not Hendrix, Gandhi, or King.

One thing that I have always thought was essential to living a fulfilled life is the ability to love one another, both because of and in spite of our differences. I have always had a difficult time reconciling in my mind the fact that people can be so difficult to reason with, or that just because people have differing view points that they think they can no longer be friends.

I first had an experience similar to the latter in high school, with my then best friend. If I'm being honest I have never really been great at making friends, it has always been a surface kind of friendship so that plays a big role in this. But, moving on, at the time we were best friends, we grew up together basically since preschool where we first met. We hung out a lot, played on the same sports teams, and overall had a good thing going, but never really connected on a deeper level than that. That surface connection started to change in middle school, but took a serious dive in high school. You see I always knew his family held different views than mine, his father was a Marine, and then later a Police officer. My mother on the other hand, divorced my father because of his conservative views, among other reasons, and became a grass roots organizer for Barack Obama's presidential campaign.  

Sophomore year we had government class together, so while he was basically preparing to follow in his fathers foot steps and enlist in the marines, I was happy go lucky in theatre and preparing for college. You can see the differences. Government class really exacerbated these and forced us apart significantly we no longer hung out except on occasion, we sat at different tables, etc. I now realize that it really didn't matter what we held as political views or what we planned on doing after graduation, a true friendship endures through those things.

This really came to me strongly today, a group of men at church is doing Saturday morning Bible study and currently we are in 1Thessalonians. While we were reviewing the designated reading (1 Thess. 2:1-12) today we fell into a focus on how we evangelize the word to others. The parts we focused on were about the love that Paul, Silas, and Timothy had for the people of Thessalonica. Verse 7  out of the NIV reads "but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children." and verses 11&12 read "11For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, 12encouraging, comforting, and urging you to live lives worthy of God who calls you into his kingdom and glory." 

We discussed how love is an essential part of being, it was put roughly like this by our study leader, if God created the universe then innately he had to create it with his personal views in mind. Since God is a loving being it stands to reason that, within the figurative fabric of existence, is the default need to love and be loved.

We went on to discuss how this is prevalent all around us, especially in the animal realm. Dogs, for example are well known to love and give affection endlessly and ask for nothing but love in return. Even we discussed that giving love, inevitably leads to receiving love back, to the extremes of people or animals that have relationships that are outside of the normal thought processes, the figurative lion sleeping with the lamb. 

I truly do believe that if the world just loved a little bit more, stopped getting wrapped up in technicalities and minor differences in someones world view and just loved them the way they are despite their differences, we can then move on to the greater things such as living together in peace, learning together, and from one another, and ultimately coexisting in a God loving world. 

I know this is a very utopian idea, and by no means am I one to really be preaching this, as I am still learning it myself but I do feel that with work and time I can become better in this and I hope that even just my small efforts can make the world that much better for it.