Monday, May 27, 2013


Is this /really/ pure love?

Well love does tend to give freely, forgive easily, hope for the best for the beloved, and look to see the best in the loved ones.

~ However ~
The words in the pic could be a sideways way of demanding unconditional support of anything those you care about decide to do (no matter how unloving, sinful. or just plain rotten.) There do have to be limits somewhere, because even the best people will make bad choices sometimes. When you ask them to turn from what you see as doing evil, the basis of these words could be used to accuse you of having only 'conditional love,' talking with intention, giving of yourself in order to influence, and so on. Can you honestly care and not respond if what the loved one is doing is going to hurt them and/or others? Asking someone you care about to take a better course is an action of love, not a condition or an expectation that holds your love hostage. When you care, you do generally hope that the one(s) you care about will not seriously turn away from the ethics & decency that you valued in the first place. Speaking the truth as kindly as you know how can still be called the opposite, because it isn't praise and they didn't want to hear it. and so on...

Best to compare statements like this with 1 Corinthians: 13

1I f I speak in the languages of humans and angels but have no love, I have become a reverberating gong or a clashing cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can understand all secrets and every form of knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains but have no love, I am nothing. 3 Even if I give away everything that I have and sacrifice myself, but have no love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is always patient;
love is always kind;
love is never envious
or arrogant with pride.

Nor is she conceited,
5 and she is never rude;
she never thinks just of herself
or ever gets annoyed.
She never is resentful;
6 is never glad with sin;
she’s always glad to side with truth,
and pleased that truth will win.b

7 She bears up under everything;
believes the best in all;
there is no limit to her hope,
and never will she fall.
8 Love never fails.

....
11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up my childish ways. 12 Now we see only an indistinct image in a mirror, but then we will be face to face. Now what I know is incomplete, but then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 Right now three things remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13: 1- 13 ISV

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