“Children don’t grow up…”
My boy N.T. bringing the heat:
… we don’t think of love as confrontational, and we often have to learn that to love someone truly may involve confronting them when their way of life is destructive to them or to others. The way of mere tolerance is a very low-grade substitute for true love. Genuine love helps the beloved to see the truth, the way things really are, as Jesus did.
I realize that this may sound somewhat contradictory to what I described a few days ago. It isn’t.
The missing ingredient from the sorts of confrontation that were being described in the previous post was love. As always, love is the key for determining how to engage people. Where love is present, one can rarely go wrong. Where it isn’t, then whatever is trying to be accomplished is sure to fail miserably.
This morning, I challenged a group of middle school students to prepare for Easter by choosing to love the people around them. It is a challenge that I’ll be taking up, as well.
Bonus: The above song accompanies the trailer to what is sure to be a wildly popular movie, Where the Wild Things Are. You may remember the book by Maurice Sendak that captured the imagination of generations of children. Check out the trailer, and enjoy the song all over again.