The Risks of Loving Others

The second of the two Great Commandments—loving our neighbors as ourselves, in other words, loving others, is the riskier of the two commandments.

What are the risks of loving others?

When we choose to love someone, we choose to be more vulnerable. We drop our guard and are open and honest with them. We choose to be trusting. We choose to give them the benefit of the doubt and to believe what they are saying is true. If and when we discover that they have not been truthful with us, we are forgiving. We do not hold their dishonesty with us against them. They may have had reasons for not being forthcoming. They may have not known what they should say. They may have wanted to spare our feelings. We keep loving them.

We also choose to be more susceptible to disappointment, heartache, pain, sadness, and tears.

In choosing to love others, we do not have the option of choosing between those who, like ourselves, know and love God and Jesus and live their lives in accordance with Jesus’ teaching and example, and those who do not yet know and love God and Jesus. We are not free to pick and choose those whom we love.

In obeying the New Commandment, to show our fellow believers the love that Jesus has shown us, we are called to love all believers whatever their stage in their spiritual growth. Some may be “infants in Christ’ as the apostle called them. They have not moved beyond the early stages of discipleship. They are not showing in their lives the actions that the apostle James tells us are partners with a vital faith. Others may have stalled in their spiritual development. Their inward desires tempt them and interfere with their spiritual growth.

Before we pat ourselves on the back and, like the Pharisee of the parable, say to ourselves, “I’m not like them," we should not forget that none of us is perfect. We all have faults, shortcomings, and blind spots. We all need God’s grace to sanctify and perfect us. We may be obeying the letter of what Jesus taught but we may not be keeping his words in the spirit of Jesus.

Wherever our fellow believers are in the journey, wherever they are on the road, we keep loving them. We love with same love that our Lord had for us when he laid down his life for us on the cross, the same love that he shows us this very moment, filling our lives with an abundance of his grace, a “good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over” poured into our laps.

We may be misunderstood. Last week I posted on my blog on what was described as “negative intensification bias.” This bias causes others and ourselves to read into our words or their words, as the case may be, negativity that we or they did not intend. It will exaggerate even a hint of negativity.

This phenomenon I do not believe is confined solely to electronic communications, based upon my own observations. Nor do I believe that it is confined to our words but is also extends to our actions. We live in a world where people are inclined to read into our words and actions more negativity than can be determined from an objective examination of our words or actions. A particular set of circumstances and our relationship with a particular individual can affect how much negativity they see in our words or actions.

In the United States people are more distrusting of each other and more suspicious of each other’s motives than people are in some other countries. In such a climate people are more likely not to take what we say or do at face-value. They may not hear what we are actually saying, only what they want to hear in what we are saying. They may not actually see what we are doing, only what they want to see in what we are doing. They will seek confirmation of their suspicions, even misinterpret what we say or do to establish in their own minds the truth or correctness of what they fear. Others with whom they are friends and who share their suspicions may do the same thing and further reinforce their fears.

The people with whom we surround ourselves can affect our perceptions of reality—the world, others, and ourselves. We have been hearing and reading a lot lately of “alternative reality bubbles,” bubbles in which the people take a particular view of the world, others, and themselves and are only open to whatever supports and reinforces that view. This is not a new phenomenon. Families and other social groups have always had their own particular view of reality. This is a phenomenon well known to family therapists and others who work with social groups. What the internet and social media has done is expand the size of these groups.

These phenomena, I believe, are so pervasive that we must work hard at listen to what others are saying and at understanding what they are doing. Listening to them and understanding them may prove difficult if they are guarded and only tell us what they want us to hear.

Here in the South individuals may have strong inhibitions against talking about what is happening in their lives. I learned as a social worker involved in substance abuse counseling and child welfare work that many people in the South grew up with a prohibition not to talk to strangers about what goes on in the family. They were punished for even unintentional violations of this prohibition. Later in life they would carry over this prohibition to themselves. Consequently, they reticent to talk about themselves in counseling sessions and home visits. They may have similarly been discouraged from expressing the full range of their feelings.

We may become attached to someone, only to lose them. When we love others, we form attachments to them. We cannot love others and maintain a complete detachment from them. Love, like friendship, requires emotional connection and involvement. We cannot love someone or be friends with someone while keeping an emotional distance from them. This does not mean that we go overboard.

We do, however, allow ourselves some positive feelings for them. We take an interest in them and in their well-being. We may develop an affection for them, “an emotional attachment” to them, “accompanied by a liking for them and a sense of pleasure in their company.” We are optimistic. We convey the positive and hopeful emotion that things are going to work out, things are going to get better.

What may be the strongest positive emotion that we can show them is love itself. Love can be defined as “a feeling of deep and enduring affection for someone, along with a willingness to put their needs ahead of your own." Love “can be directed towards an individual, a group of people, or even all humanity.”

These are not the only positive feelings that we might permit ourselves, but they are important ones.

We, however, have no control over how those we are loving will react to our love. They may react positively. They may initially react with suspicion but then grow to trust us. Or they may hesitate and then choose to respond negatively toward us. They may not be reacting to us. They may be reacting to something going on inside of themselves. Something that we said or did may have been a trigger or the situation itself may have been a trigger or the reaction of someone else in their life. By the time they draw back from us, we may have formed an attachment to them, and their withdrawal brings with it anguish and emotional distress.

They themselves may be experiencing emotional suffering. While we may be grieving the loss, we do not stop loving them. We keep on showing them kindness, caring, forgiveness, and generosity. We do not allow our emotional stress and pain to interfere with our loving them. We nailed Jesus to the cross but that did not keep Jesus from loving us and asking God to forgive us.

We may be rejected. When someone rejects us, they not only pull away from us. but they also push us away. Rejection hurts. Psychologists tell us that rejection causes physical pain as well as psychological and emotional pain.

People reject us for a variety of reasons. One of them can be fear. For reasons that we may not fathom, they have come to fear us. In rejecting us, they are seeking to remove what they see as the cause of their fear from their lives. It is their way of managing their fear. We may have not said or done anything to cause them to fear, but once fear is triggered in someone, they have tendency to misinterpret our words and actions, influenced by their fear. Anger can also have the same affect. Fear and anger often go hand in hand.

While rejection is painful, we do not stop loving those who reject us. We love them with the same love that Jesus has for us. We love them because we love Jesus and are created in the image of God who very nature is love. We love them because they are God’s children, dearly loved and treasured by God. We love them for their own sake. We love them out of our own love for them.