Blue Like Monday Mornings

Blue Like Jazz Chapter 18 – Love: How to Really Love Other People

This chapter and chapter 19 are two of my favorite chapters in this book. They have more notes jotted in the margins than any other chapters. Because I think Donald Miller makes such amazing points in these two chapters, I am having to break this first chapter up into two weeks worth of posts, so next Monday will be the conclusion of chapter 18. And, since I believe his points are so perfectly made in these chapters, I will not be doing them any justice in leaving remarks to them, so you’ll find, I only note on a couple of them, and then I just leave the rest of the space to Mr. Miller to shine through his brilliant points on the topic of loving one another…

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When my friend Paul and I lived in the woods, we lived with hippies. Well, sort of hippies. They certainly smoked a lot of pot. They drank a lot of beer. And man did they love each other…they accepted and cherished everybody, even the ones who judged them because they were hippies.

I have recently thought of myself in reference to hippies. I share a lot of the values they do. I’m all about love and peace; I suppose our differences come from the pot, and I suppose my ball cap I wear…HA! Without the pot, I suppose I am not led to the whole “free love” idea. Maybe it is the lack of pot that has saved me some brain cells to appreciate the concepts of freedom and love, without the need for “free love.”

But you have to admit, the idea of accepting and cherishing everybody is a concept that could change this world like nothing else. The hippies had more going for them then just the pot…

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I liked them very much because they were interested in me. When I was with the hippies I did not feel judged, I felt loved. To them I was an endless well of stories and perspectives and grand literary views. It felt so wonderful to be in their presence, like I was special.

Don’t you just love friends like that—people who do feel genuinely interested in you and care for you. The ones that are willing to ask you how you are doing and how your day was before they share about their own. It does make you feel special!

I think that is the first true way “to really love other people” as the title of this chapter indicates. You can really love someone by becoming interested in them and making them feel special. And take it from me; people can be really interesting, so why not get interested in them…HA!

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Because I grew up in the safe cocoon of big-Christianity, I came to believe that anything outside the church was filled with darkness and unlove. I remember, one Sunday evening, sitting in the pew as a child listening to the pastor read from articles in the newspaper…after each article he would sigh and say, “Friends, it is a bad, bad world out there. And things are only getting worse.” Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined there were, outside the church, people so purely lovely as the ones I met in the woods. And yet my hippie friends were not at all close to believing that Christ was the Son of God.

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Until this point, the majority of my friends had been Christians. In fact nearly all of them had been Christians. I was amazed to find, outside the church, genuine affection being shared, affection that seemed, well, authentic in comparison to the sort of love I had known within the church. I was even more amazed when I realized I preferred, in fact, the company of the hippies to the company of Christians. It isn’t that I didn’t love my Christian friends or that they didn’t love me, it was just that there was something different about my hippie friends; something, I don’t know, more real, more true. I realize that is a provocative statement, but I only felt I could be myself around them, and I could not be myself with my Christian friends. My Christian communities had always had little unwritten social ethics like don’t cuss and don’t support Democrats and don’t ask tough questions about the Bible.

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“What would any of us lose by losing our possessions. Maybe we would gain something, like relationships, like the beauty of good friends, intimacy, you know what I mean, man? Like we wouldn’t be losing anything if we lost our stuff, we’d be gaining everything.”

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I felt like both churches came to the table with a them and us mentality, them being the liberal non-Christians in the world, and us being Christians. I felt, once again, that there was this underlying hostility for hostility for homosexuals and Democrats and, well, hippie types. I cannot tell you how much I did not want liberal or gay people to be my enemies. I liked them.

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I began to understand that my pastors and leaders were wrong, that the liberals were not evil, they were liberal for the same reason Christians were Christians, because they believed their philosophies were right, good, and beneficial for the world.

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The problem with Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, we called it unconditional, but it wasn’t. There were bad people in the world and good people in the world. We were raised to believe this. If people were bad, we treated them as though they were evil or charity: If they were bad and rich, they were evil. If they were bad and poor, they were charity. Christianity was always right; we were always looking down on everybody else. And I hated this. I hated it with a passion. Everything in my soul told me it was wrong. It felt, to me, as wrong as sin. I wanted to love everybody. I wanted everything to be cool. I realize this sounds like tolerance, and to many in the church the word “tolerance” is profanity, but that is precisely what I wanted. I wanted tolerance. I wanted everybody to leave everybody else alone, regardless of their religious beliefs, regardless of their political affiliation. I wanted people to like each other. Hatred seemed, to me, the product of ignorance.

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On the other hand, however, I felt by loving liberal people, I mean by really endorsing their existence, I was betraying the truth of God because I was encouraging them in their lives apart from God.

Sorry, I have to comment on this one. So is loving an atheist encouraging atheism? Is it saying you accept it?

That was my note I had jotted in the margin on this page.

I don’t know. I’ve always heard, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” Can’t you love the atheist but not encourage and support their atheistic views? Just some thoughts…

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How could I love my neighbor without endorsing what, I truly believed, was unhealthy spirituality?

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[Note: All the above text in smaller italic print has been quoted directly from Donald Miller’s “Blue Like Jazz”]