When in human history has there not been conflict among each other, hatred, war and killing of people by other people. And yet, we human beings are still alive and living our lives. We have 7 billion people on the planet, and I know why.
It’s because “he” loves “her,” and “she” loves “that guy,” and “they” love “somebody,” and “he” loves “somebody” and “we” love, and “she” loves, and “different people” love and “children” love and on and on and on and on. Any planet where “many people loving other people” exists, is a planet worth living on. Any planet where a person or many people express their love through all the different forms that love gets expressed – support, kindness, patience, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, more kindness, etc, – for other people, is a planet where God is among us and active through our choice to manifest love to other people through support, kindness, patience, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, more kindness, etc.
God and Love and God and Love
Where love exists, God exists. Where people love, God’s love gets through to us. When we love any person and any life that God has created, we bring God’s Presence, Kindness, Patience, Compassion and Love onto the surface of this planet, mixing into the lives of the people we contact and with whom we connect. We bring God’s active involvement into our personal lives and our lives as a planet full of people.
The Choosing
If any person or group of people wants to bring more conflict with other people, more condemning of another group of people, more war among different groups, more killing of men, women and children – more hatred and fear of someone who is different – into the world, we can choose this activity simply by harming, judging, condemning, fearing, abusing, or hating the person we see either in front of us, next to us, far from us, or someone on the news channel. This then becomes the act we add to our children’s lives, to our family member’s lives, to the lives of the people in our community, to the people of our nation and to the people on the planet.
At any time, we can choose to condemn different people more, judge different people more, kill different people more, be more violent to people we don’t want near us. We can do this more and more, not just through our actions, but through the words we speak and write, through our beliefs about other people and our actions born from our attitudes which then become our real treatment of other people.
We can fear and hate, either the person sitting next to us on the plane who looks different, or the person who looks different on the other side of the planet that we only see on TV – all at the drop of a hat. We can inspire others to hate through our written words and our spoken words in any avenue of writing (and now social media.) We can return hatred to those people that already hate thereby increasing the hatred among more and more people in the world. Look at the world and see how we have chosen the easy way of hating and fearing the person that is different. No one of us is innocent of doing this. And as Dr. Phil says, “And how has that worked out for you?”
When we fear and hate, our hatred and our fear within our hearts and minds, go hand in hand. They are two sides of the same coin. They are the right hand and the left hand to a body of living that we can choose simply by believing our own words of fear and our own words of hate. Our fear feeds our hatred and our hatred feeds our fear. Anyone who fears and says they don’t hate is selling more fear and more hatred to any buyers.
Is Christ a real option?
Jesus was/is a real person. Regardless of what the Bible tells us, we don’t know that much about Him. We fill in the details with whatever we come up with in our minds, and from what other people come up with in their minds. We even remake Jesus in our own image and likeness, sometimes.
Other times, we put Him so high on a pedestal that He becomes unreal. When He becomes unreal, His guidance becomes unrealistic. His teachings become unrealistic, and our beliefs about Him become unusable for any real-life situations. We live day to day, and we don’t practice any of His teachings and guidance.
He was a real human being. Perhaps not the human being that we’ve imagined, though. He died from physical wounds and the blood loss. Real people die from physical wounds and blood loss. There were no EMT’s or Surgeon’s. If we were in the same situation – a knife, a sword (not too many any more) a gun, a bomb, or the like, we also would possibly die from the blood loss from wounds.
We may yet think of Him as an imaginary person. Imaginary people don’t suffer or physically die. Imaginary people go away and don’t come back. Imaginary people aren’t around when you need real help.
But, to better choose Christ, we can start with entertaining the idea that He is a real person, like you and I – “one of us” – with Him walking down the street, or next to us, or waving as we walk by. As a regular real person, His statement – “For man, it is impossible, but with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26) gives us the room for something better to be hoped for and chosen. This statement can give us hope that we can find it within ourselves to choose something better – with help from within – with God, a better choice can be chosen, from within.
Real people can act with kindness, gentleness and tenderness. Real people can act with patience and compassion. Real people, like you and I – “if God was one of us” – can choose forgiveness and mercy. This is how we can choose Christ. He chose to extend forgiveness, patience and mercy and still does.
Making a Choice
We can focus on continuing to choose to love-which takes making a decision, and then following up that decision with prayer asking for help to manifest the decision, and then following up that prayer for help with hard work – as anyone who is married, (one of many examples of an expression of love,) will tell you – continuing to love takes hard work.
On the other hand, in any one moment, in any one second, we can choose to hate and express that hatred through violence, through vengeance, through killing,…
or we can choose to love and express that love through patience, through faith, through kindness, through mercy, through more patience, through understanding, through prayer, through more prayer, and through the examples that we have already learned. We can choose through any method that brings our minds and hearts back to the better side of human beings and away from the worst side of human beings – fear, hatred, and the like.
It is so, so easy to become just like those we condemn, those we hate, those we fear or those that are different. All we have to do is condemn others and justify the condemnation, hate others and justify the hatred, fear others and justify the fear. The other side does exactly the same thing.
Deep within ourselves, we don’t want to be hate-filled and fear-filled. But, we choose that when we choose to return hatred for hatred – when we choose to return condemning of others with more condemning of others.
There will never be a day that we can stop hatred and violence in the world by opposing it using hatred and violence. We cannot add to the cooperation and unity among different people by adding more conflict and separation. Whether it’s felt towards people next to us in the grocery line or someone on the opposite side of the planet – it is the same. Thoughts of hatred and of condemning other people as well as thoughts of fear of those other people, find their way into how we treat the people in our own presence – the people sitting next to us on a plane or standing next to us in line.
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There is no difference between the violence of one person and the violence of another person. There is no difference between the hatred and condemnation that one person has, and the hatred and condemnation that another person has. Both people justify their own and both people say “God is on our side.”
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While the title refers to a “strict or strong” stance – sometimes an interpreted judgmental stance – in the Bible, I list it because it recognizes that we have freewill. We will always have freewill. We will always be able to choose. Our response to all things in life is up to us. We can choose life.
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The real God is the God of Infinite Love – the Love that existed before time, and which will exist beyond any imagined future. The real Jesus Christ is the Christ of Infinite Love. The real Spirit within all of us is the Spirit of Infinite Love. We have within us more capacity for love than we currently choose to imagine and manifest. When the time comes that we choose to imagine Infinite Love and choose to manifest Infinite Love, this world and all other worlds, as well, will change to One of Infinite Love, Infinite Kindness, Infinite Patience, and…
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“Those we pray for have God available in their lives in stronger ways than those we don’t pray for.” (The Rainbow Cards, ©, 2016, Jodie Senkyrik)
Thank you, Jodie! I fervently agree with you!
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I agree , treat others how you would like be treated regardless of were others are in their journey .
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