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Where Does Love Grow Best?

 

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ,  (Philippians 1:9-10) 

Once again, I’m going with the Bible Gateway verse of the day. What Paul says here is that love requires knowledge, depth of insight, discernment, and purity. As I think about what’s going on in our society, I see a need to encourage myself and others in accordance with this passage. Scripturally speaking, the “soil” in which love grows and bears abundant fruit is not feelings and warm fuzzies. It is in the soil of knowledge and depth of insight, and the fruit that it brings forth is discernment about what is best, and purity and blamelessness.

Let me share a simple story that illustrates this. When I was a kid, my mother and grandmother took me to a fancy restaurant for my birthday dinner. They apparently told the restaurant that it was my birthday, and accordingly the waitress brought me a piece of cake. It had whipped cream icing and contained nuts, both of which I loathed. So my birthday dinner was topped off with a failure to communicate love. The restaurant had no idea, and it probably never occurred to my mother or grandmother that the restaurant wouldn’t give me a “normal” piece of cake. And after many years, I’ve learned to ask what kind of icing is on a cake, and to not be offended if it’s whipped cream. I make a decision whether or not to choke it down. And I’ve learned to be more accepting of the nuts, too. (Not completely so.)

Years later, I learned about personality types. Some people are people-people. Some people are more task-oriented. Some people like to deal in facts, others in feelings. Some people don’t want to make any decision until they have to. Others want the right decisions made as quickly as possible. And some people like respond to ideals and ideas, while others like to keep their feet planted firmly on the ground.

For me one of the toughest of these is feelings versus facts/logic/thought. There was a time when I regularly criticized (or wanted to criticize) speakers who said things like “I feel that ______ is right/wrong.”  Something is either right, or wrong. How you feel about it doesn’t matter. Over time, however, I learned to understand, at least a little better, that some people describe these things in terms of feelings. Their feeling that something is so doesn’t make it so, and that’s not enough to convince me that it’s so – but I’m doing better at dealing with the concept.

More recently, in my search for ways to understand cultures so that I can create them for my stories, I’ve come across a series of extremes. Many I’ve encountered, but the lectures I’m listening to brings them together in a nice framework:

 Identity—Individualist versus Collectivist

 Authority—Low versus High Power Distance

Risk—Low versus High Uncertainty Avoidance

Achievement—Cooperative versus Competitive

Time—Punctuality versus Relationships

Communication—Direct versus Indirect

Lifestyle—Being versus Doing

Rules—Particularist versus Universalist

Expressiveness—Neutral versus Affective

Social Norms—Tight versus Loose

          This is not the place for a discuss of each, but as I’ve listened to all but the last two, I’ve heard echoes of things I hear in society. I’ve discovered ways in which my lifestyle differs from the prevalent lifestyle in my culture. I hope that I’m not only learning how to create interesting cultures, but also to be more loving.

       And I am coming back to conclusions I’ve reached before. The best ways to bridge the divides tends to be to give the whole group a problem in which both have a stake and require that they work it out or to sit them down to meal after meal together.

          That will never make the differences all disappear. I ate many meals with one person who – when I tried to explain the biochemical difference between introverts and extroverts – proclaimed, “Oh, so they could give you a drug and make you normal?”

          So the question becomes – what can you learn about those who are different from you that can help you to love them better?

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