easy to love?
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I never thought of myself as a "slow processor" before, but am realizing that more and more. So I guess it shouldn't have surprised me that I woke up thinking about a chapel service that happened quite a while ago.
The speaker basically ended his talk by encouraging us to be "easy to love"...and at the end, we were to turn around to the people around us and say "you're easy to love." Except that when Cherith and I turned to each other, we half-jokingly said, "You're not easy to love." Later that day Cherith was pretty frustrated...in fact, she's probably already written about this. On a certain level, married couples want to be easy to love. But then you realize that on a deeper level, people aren't easy to love - though some are easy to like.
C.S. Lewis has a lot to say about love, as you'll know if/when you read just about anything he's written. One of his statements that really stands out to me is: "Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." That is, love is an act of the will, not an act out of emotion. So in this regard, people are both easy and difficult to love. We should be willing for each person to obtain the ultimate good - God. However, as an act of will, and as depraved people, we are usually stuck in the rut of seeking our own ultimate good rather than others.
I suppose people are and aren't easy to love. I want to love people as easily as God loves me, though I realize that I can't expect other people to love me similarly. So all that being said...though I joked around with Cherith all those weeks past, I realize that as my wife she is the one person who I do will the highest good for. Now I feel like Augustine, talking about "higher goods" and "acts of the will," hah.
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