Love (Part 3)

And this is how I imagine the conversation going with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates:

St. Peter: Hello there! Welcome. Let’s keep this concise, as they do at those interviews on earth. Hopefully, you had the chance to engage in rigorous self-examination everyday to see how you were making progress in your life’s journey towards this final destination. So, you tell me yourself, what were your three greatest weaknesses?

Me: Greetings, Most Holy Apostle. May I start with my three greatest strengths, you know, the good before the bad?

SP: No, my dear. All the good in you was by God’s Grace. You are not capable of doing any good on your own, so they are all known to me. That is why you are expected to give all the glory to God whenever you are praised for any good deed!! Now the sins and bad stuff? Those are all yours, based on the choices you made every time you had to make a choice. You always had the free will to decide between doing good and doing bad. So I’m listening.

Me: Well, ookkaay. Well, there was that family friend who could have been my enemy. She did not have my interests at heart and was always trying to undermine my work while pretending to be my very good friend. I tried very hard to like her and hold on to the friendship but I found her personality exasperating. I could not just walk away from the family relationship, so I resented her. I told myself that I had forgiven her over and over again but try as I did to forget her words and actions, I could not till the day I got here.

SP: Did you ever specifically ask your Heavenly Father for the Grace to forgive her  and love her the way He forgives you and loves you? You know, The Lord’s Prayer? Your failure to do that turned this weakness into your besetting sin, guaranteed to always trip you up as the enemy exploited the weakness and turned it into an avalanche of  multiple sins!! Now, this is going to be a problem for you, because LOVE is how we roll here in heaven. And you can’t just love only those you choose to love, it is not an option here, it is a way of living.

Woah!! I snap back into the present……….now I am truly worried. I have no choice here, I have to love everyone, look for the good in them and hold on to that while praying to get around what I do not like in them, acknowledging that I am also an imperfect daughter of the King.

What about you? Can you think of anybody God has brought into your life that is impossible to like, let alone love? Can you make a list of three weaknesses you have and then pause for a minute and think of three good attributes this person might have?

Gal.5:14 For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”.

 

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