Tag: habits

Love Is A Skill

Love is a big deal. People talk about it all the time—usually romantic love these days, but the broader concept of love for others in general gets plenty of airtime as well. We seem to agree that love is fundamental to what it means to live well as a human. It’s part of who we are, built in to the human heart. Which is exactly right: love is the image of God shining out, crying out to the world around us that the something or someone we love is worthy of valuing and treasuring. In that sense, love is natural. It is one of the deepest realities of who we are, of who God made us to be.

Then again, anyone who has tried very hard to love other people well will know that love doesn’t always feel very natural. A lot of times it feels more like hard work. “Love your neighbour as yourself” sounds straightforward—until your neighbour hurts you. Ignores you. Uses you for their own purposes. Belittles. Betrays. And I’m supposed to love them?? I’d rather do unto them as they did unto me. They don’t deserve my love.

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The Freedom In Forgetting

The elephants at Belfast Zoo were rocking. As soon as we turned the corner and saw them, we had to laugh. They looked like they were grooving to their favourite tunes on invisible headphones, and we started trying to figure out what song could make elephants dance like that. The game stopped, though, when we read the sign: these elephants had been rescued from captivity and hard labour. They had spent years working in logging camps and circuses, and had gotten used to being chained up whenever they were not working. The rocking had nothing to do with dance music: It was a coping mechanism, because for much of their lives, they couldn’t do anything else.

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