“Love me, even when you hate me.” The first time I heard this saying was on Greys Anatomy, (you guys know I love my Greys!) Meredith and her fiancé Derek were too busy to find time to plan their wedding, so one day on their lunch break, they snuck into the on call room and said their vows to each other. In her vows, Meredith told Derek to Love her even when he hated her. I remember asking myself what she meant by that and I didn’t really understand her until much later. Love is not nor should it be a fleeting burst of emotion, it’s a decision we make and affirm to ourselves every day.
As much as I adore my parents and my siblings, there are days when they upset me and I find myself wondering how on earth to deal with them, but at the end of day it doesn’t mean I love them any less, I hope I am making sense, I promise I have a point. Now, the same goes for romantic love, if you decide to love someone and possibly spend the rest of your life with said person, you have to realize that it will NOT always be rosy, some days will be so hard and you just want to throw in the towel and leave but you stay because like I said, love is not a fleeting feeling, it is a conscious decision to stand by someone and care for them come what may. So basically, you love all the time, even when you’re mad, even when you hate them, you love first because it is the Christian thing to do and also because well, you have to.
The love I really want to talk about is the love between friends. These days it almost seems like friendship is slowly going into extinction. Nobody wants to communicate anymore, and technology has made it even worse because friends these days are most likely to write cryptic quotes on their social media platforms than actually sit down and talk to their friends about issues. There’s so much animosity and bitterness in the world today and it’s causing friendships to end sometimes as quickly they are born. This is happening with so much ease simply because people don’t want to put in the hard work that is required to build a solid friendship: honesty, love, respect, communication, and most importantly, FORGIVENESS. Forgiveness seems to be the missing link in a lot of friendships; people hurt you so much so you just shut them out and act like they don’t exist to you. Friendships are especially hard because unlike family and marriage where you have no option than to love, nothing really binds you to your friends, I guess that’s why it’s so easy to walk away and pitch a new tent elsewhere with new friends.
Personally, I have lost some friends because we failed to keep in touch or because we let our egos get in the way of reconciliation and I deeply regret that because honestly that’s just plain wrong. I derive joy in praying for my friends and watching them flourish so isn’t it a sin to stop praying for someone just because I’m mad at them? Sigh… I should do better, I will do better and so should you. Life is hard enough as it is, we all need people in our corner to cheer us on, to share our burdens and to laugh with us.
So here’s to salvaging meaningful friendships and to loving others even when they don’t love us back and most importantly even when we hate them, because what would Jesus do?
“Love is not a place to come and go as you please, it’s a house you enter in and then commit to never leave. So lock the door behind you, throw away the keys, we’ll work it out together and let it bring us to our knees…no, love is not a fight but it is something worth fighting for” – Warren Barfield
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