Regarding Donna Patrick’s Dec. 25 letter, “Preach two laws, one idea: love,” while I cannot speak to the messages the churches in her area give, I can speak to the local churches in the Vancouver-Portland area in which I have been attending regularly for the past 20 years. I have never heard any such message of hate as her daughter received. It seems the issue is not the lack of messages of God’s love and His command to love one another, rather the lack seems to be with us.
We all have our own ideas about love and they bump right up against God’s commandment of love. It is our individual response and living it out where we live that people see that it is evident how woefully short we fail to live up to what we have heard in our churches or read the pages of our Bibles.
Love seems to be so easy but to live God’s style as He did looks more like this:
It starts with loving God for only as we are rightly connected to Him can we ever know how to love others rightly, and loving others even when it is nonreciprocal. This kind of love takes more than a rousing Sunday sermon or charismatic leader. It is a mindset — a way of life choosing to love when it bumps up against a world that by and large rejects and distrusts God’s love.
