Friday, May 30, 2014

Loving Others in Practical Things

One of the most essential elements of loving others is caring about what they care about. We cannot really love someone if we do not care about the things which are important to them.

Conversely it is also avoiding things which upset them. If we have a friend where something of little or no importance upsets them we cannot love them if we bring it up.

You see this is what it means to love others as we love ourselves. We care about the things we care about very deeply. Love to others entails caring about what those people care about.

We cannot always get deeply excited about what others enjoy. If a friend loves to fish and I do not then I may not be able to connect on that topic well. But it is the spirit of love to care about what others care about within reason.

At the very least we should not act as if the interests of others are inferior or pointless. You see there are many things which interest others that do not interest us simply because we are different.

Some people like this piece of music and some people do not. Some people prefer certain types of food and some do not. In the realm of preference love should at a minimum accept that certain interests of others that we see no point in are simply a difference in preference.

Often we see people make absolute statements about preference and actually think they are saying something absolutely true. This is against the spirit of love. It is also somewhat irrational to think our preferences toward non ethical issues in some way are absolute or more valid than others' preferences to the same non ethical things.

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