Exclusive Love

I've been thinking about loving well lately. There are some people in my life who are hard to love. This morning, it occurred to me that love is exclusionary by definition, if not of people then at least of circumstances. To love is to place value in and have affection for. I do that to Christine to the exclusion of others. I love my kids equally, but I exclude other kids from the level of love I give to my own. Even if Jesus loves "all the little children of the world" he excludes something. He doesn't love poverty or injustice. In fact, the Bible says God hates those things. So there's an interesting logical loop —

God is love …
God hates injustice …
Love hates.

As with every other virtue, love is meaningless without its antithesis. You can't have love without hate. Christine hates cancer because she loves me; she hates cancer because it threatens her beloved.

This would be easy to live out if we could always separate the people God loves from the things that threaten their wellbeing, but of course we can't. We are a messy, idolatrous species; we marry our identities to things that destroy us. So to follow Jesus' example of loving others, do you love their addictions? Their character flaws? Their generational curses that they have come to see as as much a part of their identity as their own name? Do you hate the drunk as well as his bottle? Or do you love them both? And even if you can separate them, will he be able to?

Of course, there's another danger here which is summed up in that terrific line from Anne Lamott: "You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

What if I got really good at loving people? What if we all did? What would that do to our relationships? (Would deep love actually end some relationships?) What would it do to our churches? To our world?