One book series I highly recommend is “Beartown,” by Frederick Backman. I love Frederick Backman’s books. I have read all of them. Beartown is a series between two towns that hate each other, and equally love hockey. Think about a local town/school rivalry on steroids. Even though this book is maybe an extreme example of hate between two towns, it really shows the way we as people can “other” one another. One quote towards the end of the third book,”The Winners,” is so telling of what our lives and realities often are and that is, “It’s the same everywhere: everyone loves too much, hates too easily, forgives too little.”
The first item is “we can love too much.” This quote and blog post is starting with the positive one. We as people do have the ability to love, and to love deeply. Albeit, sometimes we don’t always love the great things. We can become madly too in love with money and the stuff it can buy, or our pride and the achievements we have made. In this book series, we see the towns love hockey to the point of addiction and self-sabotage. This made many players do unspeakable things for the purpose of glory and honor, all in the name of a game and a championship. This is where our ability to love has its pitfalls. However, especially with the power of God, we have the ability to love others very deeply. We have the ability to love our neighbors and our family members, and even with a lot of patience, the ability to love our enemies.
The second item is, “we hate too easily,” I also read a book called “Cross-Cultural Servanthood, by Duane Elmer that speaks of the easy way we as people hate others. ” This book went through the scientific research that shows how quick we as people, and especially Americans, are at making quick judgements about a person. Apparently it takes us only 2.5 to 5 seconds to make our first judgment about someone. This fast judgment can get us to decide if we want to be in a relationship with that person or don’t ever want to know them/talk to them. Obviously, this is even more when it comes to different cultures and different people than are like us. One comment from this Elmer book says, “When people don’t speak or look like we prefer, we assume negative things about them. In social research, this is called negative attribution.” (Elmer, Duane, Cross-Cultural Servanthood, 49).
This research really shows it is very easy to hate. What this quote is referring to is, of course, hating those who are not similar to us. This is not referring to hating something that is evil. It is rather hating people who live in this world. Maybe we don’t instantly call it hate, but we certainly don’t call it love. We are dismissive to those who we are able to see and meet in our everyday life. I am so prone to this. There are definitely people I will see while I am walking around and I instantly judge them. I maybe don’t like the way they are dressing or the look they are showing on their face, or even the way they are driving. I can be very quick to judge and to even have rough thoughts about them initially. I try not to let my first initial reactions take over my feelings for a person, but every once in a while, I find my thoughts are very strong and they very much do.
It can also be very hard to forgive. We as people can struggle to forgive the many people we encounter on a regular basis. When we encounter someone daily, it can be easy to harbor more and more bad feelings about them. It can be easy to feel as though we can’t actually forgive them for all they have done. My biggest problem when it comes to forgiveness is the belief that I have forgiven someone for what they have done, when in reality, I still harbor negative feelings towards them. I am definitely not as good as the Father is when he says he forgives and our sins are thrown from the east to the west and never brought up again. I may not try to bring it up again out loud, but those past hurt feelings will still be running around in my head, especially after something new and hurtful happens. If I say I have forgiven someone, I need to be better at forgiving them completely, with my whole heart.
I have two challenges for you this week that go together. My first challenge is for you to think about all the items you love. Are most of those items healthy and lovely, or have them become an obsession? We can all start to fall into the love of things of the world. Then my second challenge for you this week is to think through the areas where maybe you have hated too easily. Where are the areas where it has been very easy for you to hate and the people you try to avoid? This hate may even be an area where you are struggling to forgive someone for something they did a long time ago.
Colossians 3:23 Blog 