I hate that

What is hate?  It means to feel hostility toward, to detest.  I have found the word hate to be a, well, hateful word.  It is a negative term that is most often used to describe an over the top, passionate, dislike for something or someone.  For a very long time in my life, hate was a part of my vocabulary and my mindset: 

• I grew up in Florida before Disney, and before Florida became a mecca for anyone other than native Floridians (except Miami).  And a part of those formative years we lived in Georgia, never known in those times as being anything other than rural hick.  This was in the '50's and early 60's.  The culture then was it was natural to "hate" blacks....only in those days they were not called blacks in that culture. 
• I also "hated" homosexuals (they weren't called "gay's" then...they were queers).  That, too, was a culture of the time, a mind-set.  Sadly that culture, as applied to me, was fortified by several experiences when I was but a young child whereby a man did some sexual things to me and another couple of instances where other men tried.  I was naive and trusting as most children who are taken advantage of are.

My "hatred" for those people within our society who fell into the above two categories carried with me long into my adult life, and greatly stood in the way of my accepting people as human beings.  It took me a long time to appreciate that ethnics are people just like you and I.  It took me a long time to learn to hate the sin and love the sinner.  I had to let go of a lot of both ingrained and developed generalizations and assumptions.

Picture a monkey bar set.  Then put a label on each rung.  One might be your past mistakes.  One my be current sin.  One, as in my case, might be hate. And so on.   Now picture yourself playing on that very same monkey bar set.  You have made the swing to the first bar.  In order to get to the next, you have to let go of the first.  Starting to see something here?

 

Before any of us can have a chance of moving on to be the men, husbands, and fathers God wants us to be, we have to let go of those things, assumptions, sins, prejudices, etc. that will keep us on the monkey bars.  He really doesn't want us monkeying around with our lives.

 

How is your monkey bar set?