On Love (Part 7): Love never fails

If you hadn't gathered it already, I'm a big fan of Rob Bell. In a sermon that seems to have launched a movement, he very accurately translated "love never fails" as "love wins."

Rob Bell is a much wiser man than I. And he is a man far closer to God than I have ever been, and possibly closer than I will ever be (although I do hope, and -- most of the time -- strive to get that close). If you want to know about how love wins and many of the implications therein, listen to that sermon.

There is only one aspect of this particular passage that I'm interested in discussing. How does "love never failing" affect my life-long struggle to learn to love more.

Just yesterday, I was hanging out with a friend of mine when he said he was going to step outside and have a cigarette and then try to wash the smell off of himself so that he could hang out with his girlfriend. He said that she hates that he smokes.

As soon as he’d said this, the synapses started firing off in my brain -- this is bad.

I smoke. You may want to tell me how unhealthy or sinful that is, but that’s not what I want to discuss. I can, however, tell you with 100% certainty that something worse than smoking is hiding the fact that you smoke -- especially from a significant other.

A while back, I dated a girl for four years. I’d quit smoking before we started dating -- I use the term ‘quit’ loosely. After about a year, I started back. I knew that she would not approve. I hid it from her -- for the next three years.

I became an expert in stealth-smoking. I snuck around. When you’re hiding something that you’re ashamed of, you quickly learn to take a shower before seeing the person you’re hiding from. Always wear a jacket, so that you can take it off afterward. Use soap and water to get the cigarette smell off of your hand. There are always ways of hiding.

This caused major problems in our relationship. I found myself getting on edge after a while if I wasn’t able to sneak away and have a cigarette. I enjoyed being with her, but only in small enough spurts that I was able to get away from her and fill my lungs with that beloved tar and nicotine.

I cannot express, but I hope you can imagine how much unnecessary stress, pain, and hurt this caused both of us over the next three years. Hiding things from each other, whatever the type of relationship, will create a divide between two people -- and can easily rip the two apart.

A few times, I would want to tell her, confess to her that I’d been lying to her for so long. I would have tucked her in, upstairs, in my room. I would sleep on the couch. I didn’t do this out of some chivalrous notion. I did it so that she would be away where she wouldn’t notice me sneaking off into the night to have that last cigarette before bed.

On a few occasions, I would smoke that final cigarette of the night, and feel overcome with the need to tell her everything. She was a good person, caring. She would still love me. She would have disapproved, but we would have worked it out. So, I would put out my cigarette and march up the stairs to my bedroom, and gently touch her on the shoulder.

Surely, neither gender can control what twisted shape their bodies contort into when unconscious. Neither gender can decide whether they want their faces to display awkward expressions, or restful bliss. Yet, women seem to always sleep like peaceful angels; while men looks like awkwardly tangled monsters.

She would open her eyes and instantly focus on mine, as if she hadn’t even been asleep, merely waiting for me to arrive.

“Were you asleep?” I ask quietly.

Then she inhales deeply, something that cannot be faked.

“Yeah,” she says in the voice of a five year old girl. And I think that perhaps that might be the answer. In our dreams, perhaps we all revert back to five year olds: women, princesses and sleeping beauties, waiting patiently...like angles; men, wrestling with monsters, off on endless adventures...twisting us into misshapen beasts ourselves.

“Can we talk? Are you awake enough?”

“Um...yeah...well,” she blinks desperately, trying to keep her eyes open...it’s a battle she’s losing and finally gives up. “Could we talk in the morning?”

“Okay.”

But we never did. Most of the time she didn’t even remember. When she did, I would make up something else I’d wanted to talk about.

The courage I’d had the night before had always vanished in the daylight. That demon that whispers, “This is better left our little secret, just you and I,” always returned in the morning and taken his position back inside my eardrums.

So, when my friend gives me any reason to think that he may be stampeding toward that same disaster I know first-hand is waiting for him, I feel the need to do something to prevent this from occurring.

But how?

I go through all the possible scenarios in my head. Each of them doesn’t work. What can I possibly say to him that will change his course of action?

I am a writer and director of both stage plays and screenplays. One of the most important lessons that I have ever learned about this art form is this: you may never preach the truth, you can only reveal it.

A great writer or director takes a truth that they wish to impart on the audience and guides them into discovering it for themselves. If at any point the director or writer begins dictating that truth, the audience feels like they are being spoken down to and stops listening. The only people who will agree with the message of this sort of play are the people who already agreed before the curtain rose.

This is why I think Michael Moore fails. Sometimes I agree with his message. Other times, I do not. Either way, his ideas are so flagrantly presented that the people who disagreed with him are not swayed by his presentation (if they even set foot in the theatre).

Now, to be fair, I think that Michael Moore is a brilliant man and a brilliant filmmaker. His work has changed the scope of filmmaking, and one could easily make an argument that the rise of the documentary genre can be traced back to this one individual. He is a fantastic artist -- one we should admire for his passion and devotion to and talent in his craft.

In addition, he should be respected for the fact that he sees a problem with the world, and rather than simply complain about it with his friends, he does everything in his power to create a change. You may not agree with that causes he champions and you may not agree with his method, but the fact is -- he gets off his ass and does far more than most of us to create a lasting positive change in the world.

But he also alienates those who do not agree with him. His message, whether spoken or implied, is always ‘this is how it is, and those who disagree are either idiots or corrupt.’ Michael Moore preaches rather than reveals. This makes him a clanging cymbal, a resounding gong.

Many of you who already agreed with me about Michael Moore are now thinking, “Yeah, that’s exactly what I’ve always thought about him! Tssk Tssk! How wrong he is!” So for those of you who are a little more conservative than liberal...let me bring things a little closer to home.

You may also be thinking, “We should really change the title of ‘preachers’ to ‘revealers,’ because that’s really what they’re doing up there on Sundays.

Wrong.

Why do you think most of the people who agree with the pastor Sunday afternoon are the people who walked into church that morning knowing that they would be agreeing with him. They made a conscious choice to listen to what their preacher had to say. Those who are skeptical about this Jesus fellow, often get little out of a church service...if they even set foot inside.

There are definitely some who reveal rather than preach...but they are few, and they are not always revealing. It’s not their fault -- they can’t. It’s a difficult art, and they have to create a brand new masterpiece every single week. It is easier, by far, to just TELL people something you want them to know, rather than leading them to discover it for themselves.

Interesting that Jesus used so many parables.

Also interesting that he often didn’t explain them...just allowed people to ponder over them.

Here, he’s got this massive audience, totally hungry to hear whatever he has to say...and he gives them a riddle to work out. He doesn’t even tell them the answer to the riddle at the end.

Dr. J. Robert Clinton writes in his book The Making of a Leader about how tragic and baffling it is that so many people forget what the Sunday sermon was about after a few days. He later philosophizes that, “truth discovered by the learner sticks longer.”

So -- my friend seems to be hiding the fact that he smokes from his girlfriend. I have been through that specific hell, and what I want (out of genuine love) is for him to be spared.

I have a few options in how to proceed.

1. I can say, “Dude! Don’t hide the fact that you smoke from your girlfriend! That’s not the right thing to do!”

And what would he say? Well, first of all, he will probably be more careful what he lets slip in front of me in the future. And he would get defensive. I’ve called him out on a negative quality. He has a blemish in his soul, and I have seen it. His natural reaction will be to hide that blemish from me and everyone else like me in the future. Depending on the level of our friendship, he may simply chose to avoid me from now on.

And he probably won’t stop hiding his smoking from his girlfriend.

1. Knowing all of this, I can make it clear how much I love him and gently teach him something I know that he doesn’t: “Hey man. I don’t mean to come off like a jerk or anything, but I just noticed it sounds like you’re hiding the fact that you smoke from your girlfriend. I just wanted to say, you know, I’ve done that myself before, and it really tore our relationship apart.”

Here, I’m much more clear, and I seem much more caring. It seems like the loving option. How does my friend respond now? Unfortunately, you do not have the advantage of knowing this particular friend. I know how he would react. He’s a good guy, and the kind of guy who most definitely identifies a problem in himself quickly and responds to constructive criticism. However, I still think that this course of action would not change his behavior.

In my imagination, he would completely, wholeheartedly agree with me. Furthermore, he would explain that he totally knows what I mean. He, too, has been there himself. But the fact is that he’s not REALLY hiding it from his girlfriend...it’s just that she doesn’t like that he smokes, so he just keeps her from noticing so it won’t come up. She knows that he smokes, he just doesn’t want to smell like it and remind her.

And then he would wash the cigarette smell off of himself and go hang out with his girlfriend, unaware that what he’s doing is the same exact thing.

When someone’s pride is attacked, they become defensive, or they remove themselves from the problem. Now, why, especially in the second example, would they feel like their pride is being attacked?

They don’t think you’re smarter than them. And they certainly don’t think you’re better than them. By suggesting that we see a blemish in them, we are suggesting that we are without that particular blemish. Even when we bring ourselves right down into the mud with them, and say something like, “Dude, I totally do that myself, even though I know that it’d be better if I didn’t,” -- we are still placing ourselves above them by suggesting that while we both have this blemish in common...they have another blemish: the failure to notice the sin in their own life.

Is this boastful? Do you tell someone something instead of revealing it to them because you want to exert your wisdom? Do you seek to prove, maybe subconsciously, that you are better than they are (even if it is in some small, insignificant way)?

Is this prideful? Do you preach rather than guide because you are so convinced that you know more than your friend?

Is this impatient? Are you simply too lazy to bother spending the time and effort figuring out a clever way to help your friend internalize the truth in a lasting and effective way?

Lao Tzu said something you may have heard before: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

If you’re a fisherman, it’s probably a lot less time consuming to just toss somebody a fish.

Love does not fail.

Remember that when you set about to teach someone.

As a semi-digression, I want to make sure that everybody understands that I’m talking about revealing and guiding, and NOT manipulating and brainwashing. You can also convince someone of something using trickery and or fear. That is NOT loving, for all sorts of different reasons. The ends never justifies the means. Anyway, continuing on...

Love does not fail almost seems to be Paul’s way of telling us that they’re all tied together. If love doesn’t fail, then love that at being patient isn’t love. If love doesn’t fail, then love that fails at being kind isn’t love...and on down the list. It’s either love or it’s not.

You can’t score love. You either love or you don’t. Pride, impatience, envy, keeping record of wrongs...these things aren’t love. It’s not that you sometimes are able to go down the “love checklist” and hit certain items and miss others and give yourself a 87% score. It’s either 100% or it’s 0% because love. does. not. fail.

Furthermore, if our actions fail, then our actions were not loving. If my next course of action with my friend does not begin the long process of revealing the truth to him about how important it is to be honest with his girlfriend, then what I am doing is not loving. It’s not 35% loving either -- it’s just NOT loving.

Think about that.

And you know what, don’t stress out about it either. Because even if your actions aren’t loving, even if you fail. If you never extend one single loving action to another person in your entire life. If you are a clanging cymbal, like me and Michael Moore; a resounding gong. Even if you are NOTHING, if you accomplish NOTHING...love does. Love never fails.

Love wins.*

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*Oh, also, sometimes I tell one story but it’s a metaphor for a bigger story.