Excerpt
"Mr. Spencer then asked us about another area in which he felt metaphors cause trouble. He asked us to consider relationships. What metaphors do we use when we think of relationships? We VALUE people, I shouted out. Yes, he said, and wrote it on his little white board. We INVEST in people, another person added. And soon enough we had listed an entire whiteboard of economic metaphor. Relationships could be BANKRUPT, we said. People are PRICELESS, we said. All economic metaphor. I was taken aback.
"And that's when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dislodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. Professor Spencer was right, and not only was he right, I felt as though he had cured me, as though he had let me out of my cage. I could see it very clearly. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did.
"...I repented... I replaced economic metaphor, in my mind, with something different, a free gift metaphor, or a magnet metaphor. That is, instead of withholding love to change somebody, I poured it on lavishly. I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the mire and toward healing. I knew this was the way God loved me. God never withheld love to teach me a lesson."
--Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz
"And that's when it hit me like so much epiphany getting dislodged from my arteries. The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. Professor Spencer was right, and not only was he right, I felt as though he had cured me, as though he had let me out of my cage. I could see it very clearly. If somebody is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us, and, perhaps, we feel they are priceless. I could see it so clearly, and I could feel it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did.
"...I repented... I replaced economic metaphor, in my mind, with something different, a free gift metaphor, or a magnet metaphor. That is, instead of withholding love to change somebody, I poured it on lavishly. I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the mire and toward healing. I knew this was the way God loved me. God never withheld love to teach me a lesson."
--Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz