Christian Love

Shortly after my arrest in 2005, a Christian minister from a local parish came to visit me. I told him the following story in order to illustrate my understanding of divine love. The minister was so impressed by the story that he worked it into his next Sunday sermon. It was not well received.

Imagine that you walk into your young son's bedroom and find a naked man standing over your child's bed covered in blood. You look down and to your horror see the nude and sexually mutilated body of your child laying in a large pool of blood on the mattress. Your son is clearly dead.

When you look back at the man you see that he is holding a knife, also covered with blood, that he obviously used to murder your child. He waves the knife at you menacingly and warns you with wild eyes and a sinister smile to stay away.

Instead of attacking the man, or running away, you speak calmly and with steady assurance, and tell the man, even as your heart wrenches and tears pour down your face, that you forgive him, and that you understand why he has done this terrible thing.

Your tears and pain are for the loss of your son and equally for the terrible state of pain and confusion and desperation that you sense in the man who has killed your son. You beg the man to let you help him, and he is so stunned that he just stands still while you pick up one of your child's shirts from the floor and use it to whipe your own son's blood off of the murderer's body.

Gradually the murderer realizes you are no threat to him and he lets you lead him into the bathroom, where you run water and provide him with what he needs to get the rest of the blood off.

After he gets dressed, you take him into your kitchen and prepare some food to his order for him to eat. When he finishes, you tell him again that he is forgiven, and more importantly, that you love and understand him. You try to make him understand that you can feel his pain and confusion.

Eventually the man leaves, and you call the police to report the murder. The police don't believe your story about the man who killed your son, especially when you tell them with tears in your eyes that you forgave him and let him walk away. They arrest you and soon you are charged, convicted, and sentenced to die for the crime. But, of course, your only “crime” is unconditional love.

Actually this is an embellished version of the story I told the minister back in 2005. But the points it illustrates are the same. This is how Gos loves us, and it is how His Son commanded that we love each other.

The minister I told this story to later told me that several of his parishioners withdrew from his church's congregation when they learned the source of this story and that he was visiting me in jail.

The minister himself stopped coming to visit me when I refused to “accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior”. I told him that such “verbal circumcision” would only dishonor the genuine nature of forgiveness and love that I had already experienced. No words could, or should, ever express the divine presence that overcame me on that mountain. It was an ultra-personal experience that no words will ever adequately express.

I have not heard from that minister in over four years. I have come to suspect that he thinks the devil was attempting to influence him through me, merely because I raised doubts in his mind about his own beliefs; another sad case of blinded faith ingoramatitis.

God commands us to love and understand each other. No man is a devil deserving to be hated, though all men hear the devil's voice (deception). You can believe the lies, blindly, or open your eyes and see the Truth for yourself. God's command to love unconditionally is no more than a command to open your eyes, and to wake up!

And this command is spoken plainly and directly in our “hearts”. You should not need to “believe the Bible” in order to realize God's command. You should also realize that it is a command, not a suggestion. God is not telling us that we should try to love as he loves.He is commanding that we do so.

God would not issue such a command if it were not within the power of every living soul to comply. There will be no excuses on judgement day.