I find the universal love of mankind a little creepy. For example, I recall once having an exchange with a rather stridently anti-Mormon evangelical who kept assuring me that he loved me and all Latter-day Saints. I did not, however, feel loved. Mainly I just felt bugged. It wasn’t the fact that he was attacking my beliefs while professing love. It seems entirely plausible to me that one might attack the beliefs of another while loving that person. Indeed, one might attack the beliefs out of love for the person. Rather, what bugged me was this guy’s claim that he loved me despite the fact that he didn’t know anything about me. What on earth could it mean for him to say he loved me when he didn’t know who I was? I wanted to say, “How do you know that you love me? For all you know, I am filled with annoying tics and horrible characteristics that you hate.”<\/p>\n
I had a similar problem on my mission. First, there was always something a little hollow to me in the words of missionaries — especially greenies — who professed their undying love for the Korean people. I always wanted to ask, “Which ones? Have you met them all? If you haven’t met them and don’t know them, who or what exactly is that you are loving?” Of course, I understand the importance of “loving the people,” of serving out of regard and affection for others rather than out of duty, ambition, or the desire for praise. Yet I couldn’t help but thinking that “the Korean people” was an abstraction that often had little relationship to the actual Koreans that I met and interacted with day to day. As for them, some of them I loved, some of them I was indifferent to, and some of them (and here, unfortunately, I include a couple of my investigators) I positively disliked.<\/p>\n
Indeed, I repeatedly struggled with the problem of disliking my investigators. Of course, I knew that it was important — vital — that I love these people. I tried by an act of will to love them. Yet I knew that if I was honest to myself, I actually thought that they were insufferable, arrogant twits. (No doubt the feeling was mutual; an entirely justified reaction on their part.) Don’t get me wrong. There were some of my investigators who became my friends. I loved these people, and tried to pour my soul into serving them. But it was precisely the intensity of my attachment to these people that forced me to admit that there were other investigators that I just couldn’t stand.<\/p>\n
It strikes me that knowing and loving a comparatively small handful of individual human beings is a daunting task. I have difficulty even remembering the names and faces of more than a couple of dozen people. This is why the command to love our neighbor and to treat everyone as our neighbor has always struck me as the most daunting of all commandments. Understanding what this might mean — at a minimum do I need to remember everyone’s name? — is difficult enough. Actually doing it, strikes me as quite impossible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I find the universal love of mankind a little creepy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}