Love Can Earn You a Bad Reputation

It is well known that Jesus associated with some people who polite society deemed unsavory.

He often hung out with crooks, drunks, and sinners. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that they hung out with him. 

Jesus was not participating in sinful behaviors with them. He was inviting them into his circle, into his life. He was inviting them to himself. It seems he never looked at anyone and wrote them off as hopeless or expendable. 

Jesus knew in advance that his friend Judas would betray him, but he welcomed Judas anyway. When you love, it can end up hurting you and earning you a bad reputation. But it’s what God does.

How do we look at other people? How do we treat them?

It can have eternal repercussions.

C.S. Lewis observed: “…the dullest, most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All-day long we are, in some degree helping each other toward one or the other of these destinations… There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” 

Are we making angels by the way we treat people, or are we making devils?

As in all spheres of life, this question also applies to dating. 

Are we seeing a potential mate as a unique, valuable person created and loved by God? Or are we just seeing them as a commodity, one more online profile to pass by until we find another one we like better?

It’s not wrong to seek commonalities and qualities we enjoy in a dating partner. We have to like and feel attracted to someone if we are going to date and eventually marry them. 

But if we aren’t? Do we still respect that person? Do we ignore and dismiss them? Or do we keep in mind that they are a human being too and treat them as such? 

Pope John Paul II touched on this when he said: “God has assigned as a duty to every man the dignity of every woman.” The reverse is true too.

Of course it all gets down to Jesus’s command that we treat others how we want to be treated. In his great commission before ascending to Heaven, Jesus said it’s every Christian’s duty to make disciples of all nations. The interesting thing is that disciple-making goes both ways. We help make disciples. But in the process, we are being made as disciples too. When we love, we become more loving.

If and when we do get married, the call remains the same. We are to help make each other better people, healthy disciples of Christ. We are to help each other get to Heaven. We don’t do this by being selfish and cruel.

We do it by willing and acting for the good of our spouse, even when we’re irritated and angry with them when their breath smells or they failed to take out the trash. 

It never happens instantly. It’s a process.

God is patient with us through it.

So, the next time you’re checking out profiles or going on a date, keep in mind how God calls us to love and how Jesus treated people. You may hit it off and find the love of your life. Or you may feel no attraction and decide to move on. That’s okay. 

Just remember that person—like you—could be an angel in the making.

Not an actual angel, of course, but something the Bible says is even more: a person uniquely created in God’s image.

“God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Whether in dating, marriage, or every other area of life, let’s all help each other get there along the way.