Christian Living

Elvis Presley, that great sage and font of wisdom, is reputed to have said, “Animals don’t hate, and we’re supposed to be better than them.” Presley was assuming that the experience of hate was beneath even the animals. As he saw it, if humans are above the animals, then hate should be even further beneath them. His words were meant as an indictment of human hatred: people who hate are engaging not only in something subhuman, but sub-brutish.

Presley’s evaluation of hate reflects the widespread sensibility of early twenty-first century western civilization. Hate is considered to be the worst of attitudes, so bad that it has to be policed. Indeed, under certain circumstances it is criminal: hate crimes (which is another way of saying crimes committed in a supposed attitude of hate) are visited with greater penalties than exactly the same crimes committed in the absence of hate.

Many people view hate as a sign of weakness. They reason that hate grows out of fear, and that people only fear what is stronger than they are. To show hate is to show fear and, consequently, weakness.

People who hate are alternately objects of revulsion, of scorn, and of pity. To be accused of hate speech is to be placed so far outside the bounds of reasoned discourse that one’s actual arguments or evidence will never be considered. To be labeled as a hate-monger is effectively to be excluded from civil society. The FBI even tracks organizations that it views as hate groups.

Reprinted with permission from Baptist Bulletin Mar/Apr 2013. All rights reserved. Read Part 1.

I know of a man who met his wife in a most unusual way. One day he was making a run for his job as a cleaning supplies salesman when he passed by a house that caught his attention—actually, it was the mailbox that caught his eye. It bore the phrase, “Jesus—the Way, Truth, Life.” He was intrigued, and on impulse, he stopped and stuck his business card in the door.

“I thought that a family lived there,” he later said. As a man in his late 20s with an evangelistic bent, he was aware that sometimes people present as Christians who, in fact, are not, and he wanted to meet the family who owned the home and find out where they stood spiritually.

But instead of hearing from a family, he received a call from the young woman who owned the home—a nurse who worked the night shift. After chatting by phone and enjoying the conversation, he expressed an interest in getting to know her better, but she said he would have to meet her family first. So she suggested they meet for a Sunday service at the Baptist church her family attended. He stopped by the church, and the rest, as they say, is history. The couple hit it off, the family approved, and three years later they’re happily married and living in the house with the legendary mailbox!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey (2012), the average working person between the ages of 25-54 spends 2.5 hours per workday in leisure and sports (is Facebook a sport?). That’s 12.5 hours per week, about 50 hours per month, and roughly 600 hours per year. And remember—that does not include weekends! While we certainly need rest and recharging for the many tasks God provides, perhaps we can ask ourselves what we are doing with that 600 hours per year.