It's a Love-Hate Thing...

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength~ Deuteronomy 6:4-5 NIV

As I approach the two-year anniversary of my move to Arizona, I am beginning to realize that I have a love-hate thing going on with the desert. The love part begins sometime around the first of December as the daytime temperatures drop into the mid- seventies.

My love affair goes into full swing in early January. As my annual longing for Christmas snow comes to an end, I become entranced with the beauty around me.

The weather is perpetually sunshiny and pleasant, the flowers bloom profusely and the sky is the purest shade of blue I have ever seen. The steep, craggy mountains and unique plant life produce a stunning but harsh beauty that would make any artist’s heart sing.

  By the time February rolls around, I never want to leave Arizona.

The sunsets are so beautiful they literally take my breath away with colors so stunning and distinctive they defy classification. I have wondered what God was thinking about as He made the Sonoran desert. My daughter once remarked that it looks as if He was going through a brief abstract phase as He made this crazy-beautiful place. She may be right.

My passion dims a bit in mid-March and when the daytime temperatures start to hit the 100-degree mark. But the spectacular blooming cactus, cool nights and exquisite mornings keep me enraptured through April.

By June, my love affair with Arizona is over and done with. The whole thing ends abruptly and bitterly when I remember what a hot, miserable, mean place Arizona is. Daytime temperatures reach 110 degrees in the shade. The landscape teems with angry, horrifying creatures that all want me dead.

By early July, I hate Arizona. I hate it with the kind of passion that should be reserved for sin and serial killers. By late August, I would cheerfully board a plane and go anywhere in the world where the nighttime temperatures dip below 90 degrees.

My hatred burns unabated until early December when the twisted cycle predictably repeats itself.

I have decided that my ongoing love-hate relationship with Arizona reveals an unpleasant tendency that all of us have to love people, places and situations until the going gets tough.

The sky-high divorce rate and our societal fascination with all things easy and disposable affirm my suspicions.

Sadly, even the most devoted Christians among us can transmit this tendency to run from anything tough or unpleasant into our spiritual lives.

We love God’s people until we have a conflict with another Christian. We love the Bible until it reveals a truth that makes us uncomfortable or forces us to evaluate our lifestyle choices.  We love our Pastor until he preaches a sermon series that makes demands on our time or our money. We love worship until the worship leader makes a change or embraces a style we find unpleasant. We love God until our finances hit the skids or until our marriage becomes more about work than romance.

The sad truth is that I don’t really love Arizona the way I wish I loved Arizona. There are things I love about Arizona, but I certainly don’t love everything.  True love would be willing to embrace it all, even the creepy, mean things that hide in my backyard.  

Love isn’t love unless we are willing to embrace the good as well as the difficult that loving someone or something entails.

We don’t love our spiritual leaders if we turn tail and run the minute things get difficult. We don’t really love our church if we aren’t willing to stick around and become part of the solution. We don’t love our fellow Christians if we routinely avoid relationships with them out of fear of being hurt.

Loving people is never easy, because people are imperfect, illogical creatures who are by their very nature difficult to love. Loving God is not always easy, because God’s ultimate goal for His people is to make us holy rather than happy and the process of becoming holy can be a hard one.

But the end result of loving God and people through the good as well as the difficult is always worth it.    

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing~ 1^st Corinthians 13:1-3