There is terrible truth in that title . . . we christians love conditionally. We rarely if ever love unconditionally. I mean really love people . . . all people, including terrorists. I still shudder a bit when I recall the enthusiasm my military chaplain friend had for killing the terrorists. In fact we had an argument about it. I am not a pacifist, but on the other hand, violence only spawns more violence, killing more killing, hate more hate . . . love more love? I find my patriotic roots struggling against the idea of loving terrorists from Iraq (although none of the terrorists on 9/11 actually were from Iraq). The bottom line is that I am more American than I am a Christian (citizen of the heavenly Kingdom). This is bad, really bad.

It expresses itself in much more insidious ways everyday in my life, but worse yet in the church life. We christians use love as a product we are selling, a tool to be used. When we are targeting someone for evangelism, we love them. If it becomes apparent that the target of our evangelism is not ever going to respond, we move on in our love attention. That’s not love it is project management. Loving attention was only one of the methods employed to reach the objective, and when the objective could not be reached, loving attention was shifted elsewhere. I have seen this people-as-projects mentality throughout my entire life in the church. I hate to break this to you, but that ain’t love. And furthermore, pagans are way smarter than you and I, they already know we don’t really love them. My gay barber in the states once said it best, “I don’t go to church, those people hate me there.” Yep, those are god’s children in there . . . hmmm?

And then we use love to keep everyone in line. If our children, or the people in church behave and stay righteous, they receive our most intense and approving love attention, if they start to blow it, fail, (ye gads sin!), then we pull back from them, show our disappointment (and implied righteousness) by limiting the quantity and quality of love shown or given. Man, I get that kind of feedback from people just walking in the door of their church most of the time! I mean I don’t wear dockers, or ties or suit coats on the one side, and have long hair, and sport a couple of earrings on the other side, . . . I don’t look like their idea of christian, at least I certainly don’t look like a missionary (thank God). Don Miller said it well, "Something got crossed in the wires, and I became the person I should be and not the person I am.  It feels like I should go back and get the person that I am and bring him here to the person I should be.  Are you following me at all?" I think I should be the person I am, not a cookie cutter christian, because then I would have to hate homosexuals and look neat and be busy all the time.

This whole issue of how I/we use love as emotional blackmail has been riding heavy on my soul these last couple of days. I have been really thinking about it and came to realize that this is about as unchristian, e.g. not Christlike, as I can get. This is why our backdoors are at least as large as our front doors in the church. This is why so many drop out of the journey. Hell, this is why I think about dropping out of the journey! I am 100% certain that no one in the church would love me, if they really knew me. And I am equally certain that everyone in the local bar would continue to love me were they to know everything about me, because they don’t use love as a weapon. This bothers me much, and I am not going to try and fix you (a sigh of relief), instead I am going to try and fix me by throwing myself at the feet of the One who loves me, the real me, as ugly as it may be, without conditions. And the second thing I am going to do, is try to see people how Jesus sees them, even the terrorists. I am pretty sure He does not see them as objects to be killed and executed, but rather much like me.