LOVE: We're Doing It Wrong

If our love leads to violence… If our love causes harm… If our love is experienced as hatred, rejection, or indifference…

We’re doing it wrong.

If our love shames… If our love diminishes… If our love leaves scars…

We’re doing it wrong.

Contrary to popular belief, we can tell hard truths and draw healthy boundaries in a way that allows people to remain whole—in a way that communicates genuine care and a heartfelt desire for the other person’s wellbeing. But "tough love" isn't love if we’re more committed to doctrine, certainty, Truth, and rightness than we are to loving our neighbor.

We can require someone to change violent behavior and refuse to accept abuse but we cannot require someone to abdicate their existence, civil rights, or humanity and call it “love.”

Our need to be right doesn’t take precedence over their need to BE.

Revolutionary Love reserves its ire for one specific group of people—those who use “love” to justify violence, harm, trauma, shame, dehumanization, indifference, and rejection. Who use “love” as a weapon. Who even argue that “love” demands us to wield it as a weapon and that not wielding love as a weapon would be… wrong. 

To those wielding “love” as a weapon, I say this:

The way of love is open. 

You are welcome. Your weapons are not.

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Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

Love never dies.