Love Said, "Not So!"

I sighed after driving past a couple of wind-tattered bundles of maroon and black weave as they lay, without an owner, in the grassy median on Taylor Ave. Usually when I see things like this, especially working in an urban school, I deduce that there's been a fight between females whose hair got yanked and separated from their scalp. I'm pretty confident that this is what happened here on the median. I recall a day when I was leaving school, and when I rounded the corner of the first floor, before me I saw a sea of single braids that obviously once belonged to a female youth. However, because of this sea within my range of eyesight, I knew she no longer had them and had become a girl who was walking around covering patches in her head with a hat or hood until she could get home and tell her mama what happened in addition to scheduling a hair appointment STAT!

MAURY WHO? JERRY WHO?

Unbelievable for some? Maybe just a few. But we're in a day when Maury Povich (who's actually still on the air) and Jerry Springer are now amateurs to the violence to which we're privy. Shoot! All we have to do to see ridiculous aggression that some of us don't wish to see is scroll through our social media as we watch trusted videos, which are only to be followed by some trashy ratchet-ness where somebody's grandmother is slingin' somebody else's 14 year-old daughter around by the hair in the Dave and Buster arcade because of an offense reserved for the ignorant. FOOLISHNESS, I TELL YOU!

On a weekly basis I tell my students that I'm allergic to ratchet behavior to the point where I break out in hives when it's forced upon me. They think it's funny, but I can even think back to my own high school days when a fight would break out and I would go the opposite way of the fight. I've never been one to like watching violence, and I've certainly not run toward it. There's something about it that's very irksome to me. So, I guess, when it's come to acts of violence, I've done what the Bible outlines for believers to do with the sightings of evil, and that's flee.

ACHY, BREAKY HEART

It just does something to my heart to see individuals (outside of organized sport) pounding on each other with the intent to truly and physically harm the other. It's gruesome and devilish. And oh man! When someone has to physically fight to defend oneself! Man! The pits! I mean, who wants to incur a bruised body at any time? And when the beating is brought on by evil and lack of love? Ugh!

This is why the Bible has a first and great commandment that says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind" (Matt. 22:37). The verse right after it establishes the second greatest commandment, which is to "love your neighbor as yourself." These commandments are the two pegs on which everything in "God's Law and the Prophets" hang. This is critical stuff here, people!

FUH REAL, FUH REAL

Now, the reason, I gather these two commandments are set up this way is because in order for everyone to have the proper view on how to love another, we first must know what it is to love God. Those of us who know, biblically, that to love God is to obey Him, understand that in aligning ourselves to what He says, in all things, we're going to be groomed regarding how to love others. If we're branches of Christ (John 15:1-8), we ought to be an extension of the Way He is. We ought to produce fruit He's proud of having attached to His name. And I'm quite confident that harming another person for spite is NOT His way of doing things.

Sometimes, people bump their heads and think that God loving us means He looks at us as we see ourselves and loves the stuff that stinks, helping us to feel better about the way it smells. But BeBe and CeCe Winans said, "Love said "Not So' " and so do I! Christ IS the better Way, and He wouldn't be the model of perfection that He is if He allowed us to remain the same, "loving" us but overlooking our ratchet-ness. CHILE, PLEASE! We better get over ourselves and seek God about how He sees us and the heart posture we need to take on in order to see the way He sees. Point blank ... bottom line ... beginning AND end of story.

We dare not go to God and tell Him how He's gonna' love us. We done bumped our heads if we think this God, who is LOVE, is gonna' be okay with leaving us to being anything less than who He created us to be. He will not relinquish us to our own dusty devices if we let Him have His way with our love walk. He will take us, polish and buff us so He can continually see His reflection in our shine.

LOVE says, "Not So ..."

#LoveGod #LoveyourNeighbor #Ratchet #Evil #Fight