For instance, a spouse who demands to be treated according to their own “love language” and disregards that of their partner practices an imperfect, selfish love; likewise, a child who expresses frustration in their parents’ failure to understand them while denying them the opportunity to understand them, or even a parent who exerts their own preferences on their child without attempting to understand their child and their differences from them, similarly practice an imperfect love. The expectations of what another “should do” in a relationship, or what one “deserves” from a relationship, ought not be divorced from the kind of love which God both instructs us to establish and exemplifies in His relation with us.
Imperfect Love: Struggling to Love Like God
Hilana Said
Category: MARRIAGE
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There is tension between George and Johnny, between Ashley and Johnny, between the world and Johnny. He spends long hours away from everyone, but watch him down in the basement, when a documentary about meerkats comes on TV. He knows his wife “loves meerkats.” He races around desperately to find a blank videotape, so he can tape the show. It would mean so much to him to give her this video. He fails. Ashley explains about the tab that keeps you from re-recording over something, but he responds with anger and, of course, takes it out on her.
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“…and it was said that Rossetti never got over his wife’s death, because he thought he had not been perfectly kind to her during the last years of her life, and that she might have lived longer if he had been more kindly. His friends repudiate that, and say it is not true; but if it was not true of Rossetti, it is true of many people.
The sin of neglect, the sin of inattention, the sin of absorption in self, these have wrought a great sorrow in the lives of some, and they never rise out of the dust after.”
The Gift of Suffering
by F.B. Meyer
