Could I Love You Without Approving the Way You Chose to Live?

It seems more and more I am coming across articles and comments from others about this false notion that to love someone means accepting everything about a person and supporting their choices, even if those choices are inherently bad for them or go against our conscience.

Love and Acceptance ≠ Supporting or Encouraging Bad Choices

This post could be lengthy and explore deeper concepts of love, but instead I am going to just skim the surface to make my point.

First of all we have to understand and acknowledge that individuals can and do make choices that are wrong. Yes, there is right and wrong, no room for relativism here. We can and do make choices that can be detrimental to our physical, emotional and psychological well-being.

Secondly, we also have to realize that our choices affect others. Nobody lives in a vacuum or on an island. When we make a choice for our own lives it affects our family, friends, our community and the whole world.

Lastly, we need to be aware that our wrong choices actually lead us to that dreaded 3 letter word we are all guilty of “SIN”
As we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church
# 1850 Sin is an offense against God: "Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in your sight." Sin sets itself against God's love for us and turns our hearts away from it. Like the first sin, it is disobedience, a revolt against God through the will to become "like gods," knowing and determining good and evil. Sin is thus "love of oneself even to contempt of God." In this proud self- exaltation, sin is diametrically opposed to the obedience of Jesus, which achieves our salvation.

I’ll focus on two of the comments I have come across lately.
#1: “God is all loving...He loves all His children”
Certainly there is truth in that comment, so I say “Amen” to that, however part of loving His children includes providing guidelines and teachings on what is good and what is evil. What is beneficial and what is damaging for his creation.

#2: “The God I believe in...” Wait a minute....
Are we created in His image, or trying to create God in our image? If we can create God then we could do so in a way as to justify all our actions to aid us in drifting through life on a cushy marshmallow cloud as we justify everyone’s individual choices and fail to acknowledge the damage being done to ourselves and the world around us.

Christ says it many times in scripture, He does love each of us, and he came specifically for those who were making bad choices, living sinful lives, in fact he was criticized for hanging out with sinners – He came for sinners, he loves them but he never justified their lifestyle. He came to show them there was a better way and called them to repent and once they experienced His love they did make their free will choice to repent, to change their ways and follow Him.

Best to read it in His own words, so here are some references:

Mark 10: 21 Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him, "One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me."

John 14:23 Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.”
John 8:11 Jesus addresses the woman caught in adultery and says, “Go, from now on sin no more.”

Luke 19:1 -10 After Jesus dines with the chief tax collector, he promises to give half of his possessions to the poor and to repay those he defrauded four times the amount, Jesus says to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost."

So if we are so sure that God loves us, we should be working to repent, not to justify our own sinfulness.

God created us; He’s the loving Father, calling us home to heaven. He designed our bodies for a specific purpose. He created our human nature, so He knows all there is to know about His creation. Any act that goes against this specific purpose, this human nature that God designed is the sinfulness we need to repent from, after all, Christ came to redeem the sinner, not to justify the sin.

So that is why, following Jesus’ example, YES, I can love someone even though I don’t support or encourage the lifestyle they may have chosen to live.