Hammer on Anvil '

Alright, I’m going to warn you up front that this post is going to be a little deep.  Prepare yourself.

Several weeks ago, I posted a question on my Facebook page that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.  The question was this: Can tough love and unconditional love co-exist or are they mutually exclusive?

The consensus was that they can and do co-exist.  A common example was the relationship between parents and their children.  A mother can love her children no matter what they do and still show them tough love in order to correct bad behavior.  In fact, the two types of love are entwined because the mother would not bother being hard on her children if she did not want the best for them.

This makes total sense to me, but I still felt like there was more at the core of this question, so I played devil’s advocate.  I asked, “If we change how we express love to someone based solely on their choices and/or behavior, isn’t that the definition of conditional?”

The basic response to this was that conditional love is not defined as HOW we love someone, but WHETHER we love them.  A child’s behavior may cause a mother to change how she demonstrates love to him (i.e. she might need to show tough love in order to correct the behavior), but she never stops loving him.

This caused me to think about the perspective of the person who receives tough love.  Wouldn’t they see it as a form of conditional love?  Maybe even as manipulation?  If you have always shown your love to them in a certain way, and then their choices cause you to act differently, it would seem to them that you require them to behave a certain way in order to receive the same level of love.  From their perspective, it might seem that you are imposing your own personal belief system on them.

At this point, I’m departing from the mother and her children comparison.  I’m thinking about two adult friends.  If your best friend started acting differently towards you because he didn’t agree with some choices you’ve been making (because he feels those choices are not in your best interest), would you feel manipulated or would you feel loved?  What if you disagreed with his assessment about whether it was in your best interest?

I think that how we feel about this issue deeply affects our relationship with God.  God also shows both tough love and unconditional love.  When He shows tough love because you have sinned, do you feel loved or manipulated?

I’ve thought about this a lot lately and I think I’ve finally come to a conclusion.  Whether you feel loved or manipulated comes down to one issue – how much you trust the judgment of the person demonstrating tough love.

When we are children, we trust the judgment of our parents.  We don’t always like it, but we trust it.  And when we’re adults, we have to decide whose judgment to trust when our judgment is in conflict with that of our friends or family.

The same is true of our relationship with God.  When our choices conflict with God’s judgment, we have to decide whether to trust ourselves or God.  When we trust ourselves, we see God as a manipulator, offering our withholding love based on our actions.  But when we trust God over ourselves, we see the truth that God loves us the same throughout; He just wants what is best for us and He knows better than we do what the best is.

"Listen to advice and accept correction, and in the end you will be wise." -- Proverbs 19:20