To love or to hate?

On Valentine’s Day I witnessed two very different interactions between people. The first one was between children at a Valentine’s Day party for Abby’s class. There was this little kid who was about two maybe three years old, he was obviously a younger sibling of one of Abby’s classmates, and he was into everything. He was going around the room shooting people (mostly 3rd graders) with his finger. Of course he was making that shooting sound with his mouth that required saliva being spit out in the process. Most of the 3rd graders were very patient with him, because he was two. But one 3rd grader after this two year put his finger on his back and shot him, turned around with an angry face and an angry tone, and he said “Get away, I’m going to kill you kid”. It was shocking for me and the others that witnessed the event. Immediately I felt sad for this young man, this 3rd grader who had enough anger and hate in him to say something evil in such a threatening way. It broke my heart to see someone so young being led by anger and hate, being led Satan. That 3rd grader was angry before he came into that class; he woke up and decided to be angry. When confronted with an annoying 2 year old, he was given the opportunity to display that anger.

Later that same day Stacy and I were drinking coffee at Barnes and Noble (that’s what cool people do), and we witnessed something powerful. There were two other couples sitting in the coffee section of the store, one older the other younger. The older couple said to the younger one, “we haven’t seen you in a while at church”, and the younger couple said “yeah we moved down to Franklin and go to church down there.” Then the older couple said, “are you still trying to adopt a child?” The younger couple said, “yes, but it is very expensive, we are trying to adopt an orphan from Haiti, and we have had to start a fund raising campaign to make it happen.” The older couple said, “we want to contribute to that account, we want to help you adopt a child.” While he was writing out a check he said, “I woke up thinking that God would use me today to bless someone financially”.

Two things I learned on Valentine’s Day: First, do not conduct business around me because apparently I will eavesdrop. Second and more importantly, the older couple woke up that day and decided that they would bless someone, that they would live by the Spirit of God, and that they would do something special for someone out of love. When we hate or love, it is not an accident, it is a commitment we live with everyday. To live without God or to ignore the urgings of the Spirit is to choose hate, but when we choose God, we choose to live His Spirit; it is to commit to love people before you even meet them.