Daring to define “unconditional love”

Love unconditionally but never approve unconditionally. If you approve of everything I think, say, do, and believe, you may flatter me , but you don’t love me.

Unconditional love:

Cares deeply even when it disapproves.Doesn’t passively approve when people mistreat themselves or others.Alerts people when they’re making harmful choices and tries to help them go in a better direction.Continues to care deeply about people even when they label its warnings and concerns “hate.”Doesn’t delight in people’s destructive decisions or their distorted desires.Wants to rescue people from darkness, not to help them keep the light out.Doesn’t encourage people to wallow in guilt-producing behaviors.Is willing to disrupt deception by compassionately speaking truth and shining light into darkness.Disapproves of people’s pain-producing and self-harming choices. Wants people to be set free from deceptive desires.Cares enough about people to risk their rejection by trying to help them see when they’re off track.Doesn’t blindly defend people’s self-produced pain but tries to help rescue them from it.Isn’t pleased when people put personal pleasure ahead of honesty, integrity, responsibility, and caring and compassion for others.Doesn’t offer unconditional approval but openly disapproves of people’s self-harm and self-deception.Tries to help people avoid guilt by encouraging them to avoid the choices that produce it and to turn away from those choices if they’ve already made them.Is saddened when people take pride in hedonistic choices.Never demands approval but allows people the freedom to reject it.

When people demand unconditional love what they’re really demanding is unconditional approval. To applaud and approve while people self-destruct is a loveless act. To applaud wrongdoing is to reject unconditional love.

When someone is asleep in a physical or emotional fire, unconditional love warns them loudly. When someone is about to be run over by a bus they don’t see, unconditional love shouts out in alarm! When people are swimming in a world of hungry sharks, unconditional love tries to pull them out.

Approving of and applauding people’s poor choices isn’t unconditional love. It’s a self-focused way to avoid their hostility. If we don’t approve of everybody’s choices, viewpoints, and behaviors then we have no right to demand that they approve of ours.

My parents loved me unconditionally. They cared enough about me to warn me when they thought my life was off track.

To demand people’s approval of your choices and behaviors is to demand that they abandon their conscience and values. If we really believed in God’s unconditional love, we’d surrender unconditionally to Him.

Tomaz Salamun, a late 20th century poet born in Yugoslavia in 1941, exposes the fallacy of demanding unconditional love. He wrote: “I demand unconditional love and complete freedom. That is why I am terrible.” Lord, have mercy on me a sinner!

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