Strength To Love

I love Jesus. And I love Dr. Martin Luther King.

Both men, known for their compassion and peaceful ways, are simply jaw-dropping in their grasp of how to meet life and its various challenges. As the saying goes though, don’t mistake their kindness for weakness. It takes a very special, divine kind of strength to meet hatred with love, to pray for people who want to destroy you, to face your enemies with no weapon and no intention of fighting back.

So I stumbled upon a copy of Dr. King’s “Strength To Love” and started reading it last night. It comes at a time when I’m going through an extremely difficult divorce and custody battle. And while the situation demands that I take a stand, I do so not with malice, anger or vengeance. I take my stand in Jesus’ eternal call for us to love and forgive, no matter what the situation.

Still, it never hurts to be reminded. Which brings me to Dr. King’s book. The very first chapter’s title was heaven-sent: “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart.” I would post an excerpt here, but what the heck — go read the first several pages of it online via Google: Strength to love – Google Book Search.

It’s easy to think of Dr. King as a mere civil rights leader. But underneath the “Been to the mountaintop” and “I have a dream” sound bytes, there was an extraordinary wisdom and moral clarity that fueled everything he did. He wasn’t calling for us just to break the chains of racial injustice — he was calling upon us to be better human beings, and to be better TO human beings.

I think he’d like “A Message From God.“