Do I LOVE you or do I love YOU?

In our free store conversation on Wednesday morning Carlos started us off by asking us to think about where the emphasis is placed when we say, "I love you."  Is it I LOVE you?  Or is it I love YOU?  Do we love because that is just something that we do?  Or do we love because of some quality in the person that we are loving?  He told us to keep that distinction in mind as we continued our study in the book of Galatians.

We jumped into the conversation by talking about Abraham's two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, and his two wives, Sarah and Hagar.  We joked a bit about what it might be like to have two wives or two husbands but in general nobody thought that would work out very well.  Carlos basically told us that Abraham's two wives represent two different ways of relating to God.  The one way is governed by rules.  We have come to refer to this as the "don't system."  But what we have been discovering is that the "don't system" just "don't" get us right with God.  Someone said that when we are always taught "don't" that we come to think that we "can't" and so we don't.  That whole system is completely self-defeating and many of us have come to see it is also a dead end street.

Carlos told us about being required to take a driver's education class as a result of some traffic violations.  He didn't say exactly what they were and we missed our chance to ask him and tease him about it.  But he said that a guy in the class asked the training officer about how much you could travel over the speed limit before getting a ticket.  The officer explained to the man that it was called speed "limit" for a reason and that you could be ticketed no matter how fast you were going over that limit.  This made us laugh as we realized that the law points out our limits rather than stretching us to develop our potential.

Our friend Carolyn told us later in the day, when she stopped by for a visit, that she had been at the courthouse and had left her car parked on the street too long and got a ticket.  When she came out and saw the officer writing the ticket she said "I've never gotten a ticket before, can you take it back."  The officer said, "No.  You have to keep it."  That story gave us a great deal of pleasure as it showed us even more clearly the function of the law to limit us rather than to further our development.

So we were glad when Carlos pointed out that there is another way of living that is an alternative to the don't system with its rules and limits.  This is the way of love and creativity and freedom. It puts us on a path of growth that leads us to become mature and responsible human beings.  This way of life frees us to do things that seemed impossible under the don't system that pounded the can't into our brains.  Carlos told us that we can live by love and that we could do it today.


As our discussion moved to a conculsion one of our friends talked about a neighbor that she had helped but the woman was now treating her unkindly.  Carlos said that sometimes when we love people they may think that we are trying to manipulate or take advantage of them in some way because they are not used to being loved in the right way.  Sheila told us about experiences she has had in helping some of her homeless friends and then being taken advantage of.  However, she said that she was going to keep loving them anyway because she remembered how hard it was to be on the street.  She talked about how we don't always know how difficult another person's life may be and that we shouldn't love people just because of what we can get out of them.

That seemed like real wisdom and it also brought our conversation full circle back to where we started.  Do I LOVE you?  Or do I love YOU?