Being Free to Love Everyone

“I always prefer to believe the best of everybody;

it saves so much trouble.”

— RUDYARD KIPLING (1865–1936)

We too often don’t realise how simple life can be kept; God designed life such that we would place him first (Psalm 37:4; Matthew 6:33). Whenever we do this we are affirmed about the essence of life. Whenever we get it wrong—elevating anything else over God—life gets complicated.

It’s like the relationship status, “It’s complicated.”

“Complicated” makes for more of life than was ever ordained by God. ‘More of life’ is what tempted Eve in the garden. We neither needed more of life than what God gave us nor did we need the complications that come from ‘more of life’.

One salient example of when we demand more of life is when we demand other people be like us: the source of bigotry, jealousy, striving, ridicule, ignorance, pride, and arrogance. When we insist people be like us, we see evidence more and more of the worst of them (from our shrivelled perspective).

Allowing the World to Be As It Is

We only appreciate beauty when we see it. What seems obvious is a powerful truth when consider the opposite: we miss very much beauty in life when we are looking for more.

But why would we want more when we have everything already in God?

Then we come around to the truth that we are embattled spiritually. Since the moment Eve listened to the serpent and Adam looked away our hearts have been fought for: a titanic battle in the heavenly realms.

God will say, “Look to me and I give you everything you need,” and Satan accuses God, saying, “He’s lying; He knows you need more.” But God does not lie.

Being free to love everyone is only a possibility when we reject the complicated life and we opt for the simplicity of what God ordains for all our moments.

What is Life?

Once we realise that life is about God and that God placed us here, principally, to relate with others and give him glory we get the simple life.

This simple life—where we can appreciate nature, spiritual things, simple friendships, etc—where we can let many things be just as they are—and appreciate them without any effort—enables more of the life where we see beauty; particularly the beauty in all others. Then we experience less trouble.

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Why would we want more when we have everything already in God? This simpler life is all we need, where we see beauty all about, and we have no room for judging things different to ourselves. When we truly begin to love diversity we know God is biggest in our lives. We are putting God first, like we were always meant to.

And strange as it seems, this simpler life means we get on with people so much more. We are no threat to them as they are no threat to us.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.