Love is Unconditional

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear." Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." Lao Tzu

“What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off?" Jesus Christ

In our previous posts, we have discussed that love is action and love is understanding. In taking the first step of understanding another, one can learn the subsequent steps to acting in a loving way toward another. These are fundamental endeavors.

Some will inevitably find themselves in a roller coaster of love. At times the love will peak in enjoyment, while later reaching deep into the valley of difficulty. A month or two of real connectedness will be followed by subsequent months of the opposite. The ever-told stories of no longer being “in love” are heard and experienced by more people than care to admit it. What explains the roller coaster?

A spouse will never fail to remind us that during the dating or courting part of the relationship we did things that we NO LONGER do. Holding doors open, bringing in flowers, and deep focus on the details of the relationship often characterize the man’s behavior in those early moments. The time a woman spent on appearance, the time and space she gave the man to himself, and the playful fun was plentiful. These things take effort, patience, and compassion. As circumstances arise, love becomes conditional.

We presume that the feeling of love just drifts away. The reality is that the ACTION of love drifts away. It does not drift away on its own. Action becomes more difficult, and it drifts away on the raft of those difficult circumstances.

Unconditional love levels the playing field. This concept is truly the hinge pin of what makes love fail or prevail. What we must come to grips with is the fact that loving someone when things ARE convenient is shallow and lazy. To love when it is NOT convenient strengthens our ability to do so, multiplying the effect of our labor.  

Strength of GIF is all about building a strong self and strong relationships. If you want to build muscle, you cannot enter into the gym once or twice a month. The result will not be favorable. Building muscle requires consistency. It is a self-evident truth. Building social/emotional muscle is no different. If we want strong relationships, we have to act lovingly day in day out.

We are not talking about rewarding bad behavior. You are not required to condone and support bad habits. What you should NOT do is isolate someone or abandon him or her in his or her weakness. Now is not the time to talk bad behind someone’s back, to refuse to talk to him or her at all, or to neglect his or her well-being. You must continue to do the positive things that you would do in the perfect case scenario. When the stakes are higher, it’s just going to cost you more. The good news is that you will also get more from it.

The person that knows you love them in their weakness will not hesitate to trust you. They will not walk on pins and needles around you. They will not make you an offender for a word. What they will do is act boldly, with your forgiving cushion to aid them.

This will also strengthen the people around you. Knowing that you will not abandoned a weakened person, the group will be confident to act courageously and benevolently towards you. We are weak at some point. Having a team (aka family) that consistently (and without condition) leaves the 99 to retrieve the 1 who has gone astray, strengthens the relationship of the entire fold.

At the heart of this matter is belief that we are each created uniquely in the image of God. We all reflect his divine nature in our best state. In our worst states, his image is hidden, sometimes buried, but still resides. The will ALWAYS responsibility rests with YOU and I to wrestle it back out of the people we love.