You Aren't How You Feel

My daughter is not a bear.  In case any of you have ever been confused by some of her actions, growling, and "claw" attacks, she is not actually a bear.  Just a funny and precocious three year old with a propensity for imagination and ridiculousness.  It is quite fun to play "bear" with her, and I will sometimes even initiate it by growling at her.  The best part of being a bear is that the game usually turns into the bears going to "sleep" and snuggling together.

Even with all that fun, I have never sent her off at night to go sleep in the woods, nor have I encouraged her to climb inside of the bear exhibit at the Zoo so she can take her fun to the next level.  She is still a three year old girl who needs her mommy and daddy to remind her to NOT pick up dead squirrels off of the road(true story....).  There is a logical and reasonable approach we take to raising our children;  There are immutable and intractable facts about WHO they are.

In culture today we have accepted and promoted the idea that we ARE how we FEEL or what we DO.  

This is in direct opposition to reason, logic and reality.

It is also destructive and dangerous.

Think about this simplistically.  If how we felt was the best arbiter of what was best for us we would all eat healthy well balanced diets, exercise, never procrastinate, never act towards people with anger, purposely hurt other peoples feelings or act selfishly to the damage of others.  Virtually all of the problems in the world are a testament to people following their "feelings".

Don't get me wrong, feelings are great.  I like to get allll the feels...when appropriate.  And NOT when they are counterproductive to truth and reality.

Have you ever been mad at someone for something they did?  Like really really mad?  And that anger caused you to act towards them in a way that reflected that you were angry?  You have???  Hey, me too!  Welcome to humanity.  But what if you found out that what you thought they did to you did not really occur?  And you had been completely wrong?  What do you do?

You might say that you of course would change your ways.  But you know what is interesting...we often have become so invested in the way we are feeling that we invent, or search for, reasons to justify how we have been feeling.  We begin to process how we feel through a psychological behavior known as "confirmation bias".  In a nutshell, it simply means we seek out any justification or support for what we already have chosen to think/feel and refuse to acknowledge or address any information that is counter to our already established perspective.

So how do we counteract this?

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.--Genesis 1:27

The very foundational reality of our immutable selves is that we are created as reflections of the very nature of God.  In our unique and beautiful creation we are the most truly "US" when we seek to emulate and reflect that reality.  Everything, and anything, else is a distortion of that Truth.  And this is not some amorphous flexible concept that says, "However I feel is the way God made me so therefore that is who I am and no one can say differently".

The wonderful thing about God is that He is not some unknowable floating cloud of ephemeral smoke that is impossible to know and be known by.  He has revealed his Nature, his Character, and his good Design in Scripture and the person of Jesus Christ.  We are not left wondering, "Am I really a bear?"  We instead told in no uncertain terms that we are image bearers of the Most High.  And, that His character that we made to reflect is clearly described and we are called to live in alignment with.

Our "flesh" and feelings can be powerful.  But they are not ultimately true.  Courage and bravery is not succumbing to how you feel, but instead having the willingness to say, "Not what I feel, but what is true about God and therefore about me".

Adorable and sweet until he thinks he can do this off of a tall building......

How Do We Love

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
― C.S. Lewis

The modern definition of love is most often used in the context of feelings that you feel for someone.  If someone makes you feel good and is attractive you have all the ingredients for "love".  And if you realllllly have these strong feelings for someone, and happen to also want to have sex with them....well...it's love....let never the two be split asunder! 

Shockingly, today, we have an ever increasing number of divorces, children born out of wedlock, affairs, etc.  When "feelings" become the arbiter we have established an amorphous and unstable standard on which to base relationships and our conceptions of love. 

There is a reason that marriages often dissolve between years 5 and 10.  For most people the butterflies of fresh love have been replaced by the mundane nature of daily living coupled with the stresses of children, bills, careers, and new "attractive" people.  When we place romance as the pinnacle of the value of a relationship we will soon find ourselves without good reasons to continue.

This perspective also influences the approach we take to all relationships.  It is easy to speak with eloquence about how much you love others and what a good person you are for caring about their experiences.  But when push comes to shove we would much rather talk about our ambiguously defined feelings than make practical commitments to showing love to someone else when it doesn't translate to achieving something for ourselves. 

Instead, I challenge us to approach love as a deliberate act of the will that puts others first regardless of how we may "feel" about it.  As CS Lewis said in the opening quote choosing to act love outwardly will shape us inwardly.  I have been recently studying the book of Ruth and I think there are three lessons that we can draw out about the practical expressions of giving love to others.

-----if you haven't read, or, recently read, the Book of Ruth, read the first two chapters to get the context for what I am saying here-----

Ruth is a pagan foreigner(boo), recently widowed(boo), living with her widowed mother-in-law who, with her husband, ran from the promised land some years earlier(more boos).  For all practical purposes Ruth is person non-grata in Israel when she shows up at the field of Boaz to hopefully pick up some scraps so she doesn't starve to death.  There was nothing about her that eligible bachelor's in ancient Israel would find "attractive".  Yet, Boaz displays great love towards her.

1-  He speaks kindly with her(Ruth 2:11-12).  Boaz was a busy, respected and successful man.  He could simply have ignored her and no one would have noticed or cared.  He was under no obligation to be kind to this strange pagan foreigner.  But he goes out of his way to seek her out and speak affirming and encouraging words to her.

You and I are surrounded by people who no one would even notice if we didn't take the time to notice them.  Being a loving person is about showing love to those who you have no "reason" to love.  You can say you love your neighbor, but when is the last time you sought them out to share an encouraging word, to ask how they are doing, to pray for them?  We are not loving people if we only give kind words to those who are easy and convenient for us to be kind to.

And to be even more personal, when is the last time you also deliberately spoke with kindness and encouragement to the people in your life?  Like your spouse?  If you only say, "I love you" when you want something....how loving is that?

2-  He shares his life(and a meal) with her(Ruth 2:14).  Boaz doesn't just say something nice and then goes about ignoring her.  He invites her to sit with him, to eat with him, to show real care for her.

Speaking kind words is important, but, they are also easy.  Who do you need to go out of your way to show practically in a real and tangible way that you love them?  Don't say, "I love you....but please don't spend any time with me"

3-  Boaz goes above and beyond and makes a personal sacrifice to help her(Ruth 2:15-16).  Instead of just the bare minimum of letting Ruth have whatever scraps are left, Boaz provides for her from his own personal harvest!

Love, real love, leads to sacrifice.  If you want to practically put love into practice, are you willing to cost yourself something in the process? 


Do you want to truly love people?  Stop feeling stuff about them and start giving of yourself for them regardless of how you feel.  Because just doing stuff for people you "like" is easy and not really very loving at all.

Still a better love story than Twilight

Choosing to Love

Love has been really dragged through the mud in our modern age.  It is bent, twisted, morphed, manipulated and downright abused by a myriad of ever sifting opinions and attitudes.  Just listen to the music on the radio and what they have to say about love.  Or watch a movie or TV.  What is love all about in those arenas?  Feelings.

Don't get me wrong.  "Feeling" in love is just dandy.  There is nothing wrong about getting butterflies when you see "that" person.   But that is not "love", that is attraction.  You may contend that "attraction" is a prerequisite to love, but I disagree...mostly. 

We live in a time where we have the greatest access to luxuries and comfort.  Medicines and food.  Yet, depression and suicides are becoming an ever increasing problem.  What are we so depressed about?  I would contend that it is loneliness.  At the end of the day, we can't face our problems and our hurts, because we feel like we face them alone.

Why do we feel so alone? 

Because we have come to believe that our value and worthiness to experience love is based upon things we have to do to create that feeling in others.

I have to be pretty/handsome enough.

I have to be smart enough.

I have to be rich enough.

I have to wear the right clothes, see the right movies, drive the right car.

And we never feel like we measure up.  When we don't measure up to these arbitrary standards we feel unlovable.  We have accepted the idea that love is a feeling that we create in other people based upon things about ourselves that are deemed lovable.  When we can't engender those feelings in others, or, they stop feeling that way about us, we decide there is something irredeemably broken about us.

When love becomes an emotion driven feeling we will all become victims of experiencing people not feeling that way about us.  So what do we do?  For many people, it is jumping from experience to experience, or, relationship to relationship, to rekindle those high heady days of first attraction so that we can feel what we think is love again.  Because then we will be ok.  But, eventually, it too wears off, and we are left feeling just as bad and lonely as we did before.

Love CAN manifest itself in emotional feelings, but emotional feelings do not manifest in love.  Love, the kind of love we desperately seek and are made for, is an act of the will.  To choose to sacrifice your selfishness for the good of the person you have chosen to love.  And, as we continually discipline ourselves to that practice, we will find our emotions becoming realigned to reflect the reality of our behaviors. 

Our example and our hope is from the author of our very selves.  When God talks about love, he isn't talking about warm feelings he has for us, he is talking about the choice he has made to love us.  In Ephesians 1:14 we are told "Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes."  It doesn't say, we were pretty enough, or moral enough, or smart enough.  It says he chose us.

In Malachi we hear Israel asking God if he really loves them.  He doesn't write them some flowery poem detailing how pretty their eyes are and how his heart goes pitter patter when he sees them, he says, Of Course I love you, I chose you to be mine. 

Love is a choice we make.  An act of the will to love a person, not because of something they earn in our eyes(because that means they can also lose it), but because we have decided to commit to that choice. 

Do you want to be loved by someone who will love you as long as you are a certain way?  Or, do you want to be loved by someone who will choose to treat you selflessly in love regardless of your flaws, mistakes, and failures?  If we only seek love rooted in emotion, it will always fall apart eventually. 

That is the beauty of God's love for us, the love we are called to live in accordance to.  We are not under some obligation to earn it, or, to continue to earn it.  We are simply invited to experience being loved.

Ask yourself if in the relationships in your life(spouse, kids, friends, family) do you love like God loves, or do you love out of selfish desires of what you can get from that person. 

We want selfless love for ourselves, but don't often give it to others....