Remember last fall, when somebody predicted we were going to get two hundred inches of snow this winter?
I don’t remember who made the prediction, but it got a lot of publicity. I never believed it—two hundred inches of snow would be almost a foot a week every week of the winter—but a lot of people did. Even people who did not believe that forecast thought we were going to have a bad winter. I lost count of the number of people who told me that this winter was going to be at least as bad as last winter, if not worse.
Well, winter’s not over yet, and there’s plenty of time for us to have some snowstorms. It’s obvious, though, that we’re not going to get two hundred inches of snow. It’s also obvious that this winter will be nowhere near as bad as last winter. Even if we get a few snowstorms, spring is only a couple of months away. All those predictions of gloom and doom were totally wrong. Yet, a lot of people believed them.
Why is that? Why are we so eager to believe the worst, rather than the best? And why are we so eager to try to convince others of it?
There seems to be something inside of a lot of us that wants to believe the worst, whether it’s about the weather, about the economy, or about other people. This is a presidential election year, of course. Every election year, people complain about the number of negative ads that are run, in which a candidate does not tell us positive things about himself or herself, but tells us negative things about their opponents. We complain about those ads, but we also believe them. The reason negative ads are run is because they’re effective. For some reason, we tend to believe the worst, so when we’re told something bad, it sticks with us.
We also, sometimes, tend to believe the worst about ourselves. None of us is perfect, of course. We all have our faults and our failings. Sometimes, though, we come to define ourselves by those faults and failings. We forget all the positive things about ourselves, and focus on all the bad stuff in our lives.
I wonder if that might be one of the reasons people sometimes have trouble believing in Jesus as their savior. We refer to the gospel as the good news, but maybe, for some people, that news is so good that they can’t believe it. We can’t believe that the divine, all-powerful, almighty, everlasting God would love us or care about us as individuals. It doesn’t seem possible that the divine Son would actually give his life to save us. We can believe that God would punish us for the bad things we’ve done, but that God would actually love each one of us as an individual and forgive each one of us for our sins, no matter what they are, that just doesn’t seem possible.
I can’t think of anything I can say that will convince people that this good news is actually true, any more than I was able to convince people last fall that we wouldn’t get two hundred inches of snow this winter. I don’t think this is a case where logical arguments are persuasive, at least not at first. I think the way to convince people who can’t believe in the good news is to love them, to show them we love them, and to keep loving them no matter what they do or say.
I don’t mean to imply that this will always be easy. It takes a lot of faith, a lot of hope, and a lot of perseverance to love people sometimes. People sometimes resist our love. People sometimes reject our love. People sometimes test our love, to see if it’s real. When people have believed the worst all their lives, it can be very difficult for them to believe that something good could actually happen to them whether they deserve it or not.
It’s difficult, but not impossible. If we love long enough and hard enough and consistently enough, we can ultimately break down people’s resistance. It won’t be easy, and it will take time, but it can happen.
God loves each of us, no matter who we are and no matter what we’ve done. The least we can do in return is to love others, even when those others make it hard for us.
well said my friend.
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