You Can't Hate Hannah and Love the Lord

You can safely assume that you've 

created God in your own image when it turns out that God 

hates all the same people you do. 

~ Anne Lamott

Sometimes, I'm not too proud of myself. 

Sure, I love God, and I long to see His love shining through in my life. But the process is hard, the road is long, and the transformation is difficult. I'm most certainly far from perfect. I may write this blog and "preach" my sermons, but deep down inside, I'm just the same as you are. I'm simply human. 

I'm a hypocrite, just like everyone else. I'm a sinner, just like everyone else. I'm selfish and I'm impatient, just like everyone else. But then, I've been redeemed by the beautiful blood of Christ. And that, my readers, is sadly not the case for every person on this planet. One of my goals with this blog is to help lead others to Christ and to reignite the dying passions of customary Christians. (I used to be one of those "customary Christians" by the way. But then, somebody helped reignite me.) 

Anyways, there's this one thing in particular that I'm not proud of having done recently. I kind of hated somebody.

I know it's wrong. And I don't actually hate this person. I don't wish death upon her, and I don't wish that she'd never been born, and I don't pray for bad things to befall her. But I did harbor some ill will towards her; it was one of my most recent raging battles.

Though I won't go into too much detail, I'll give you the quick rundown. Let's change this girl's name to Hannah for easy referencing. Anyways, Hannah and I met within the past year. I tried to be nice to her; really, I did! It's not that she'd wronged me in the past; I'd never even met her. I don't know what it was about her, but she and I just didn't hit it off. She was the oil and I the water. We could co-exist, but never mix. 

As much as I tried to give Hannah a chance, she just wasn't interested in giving me one. She was rude to me, shrugged me off, avoiding talking with me, gave me the worst death glare you've ever seen, etc. And the more time I spent around her, the more annoyed I became. And the more annoyed I became, the more frustrated I ended up. Before I knew it, my frustration grew into aggravation and my aggravation to disgust to a pretty strong dislike. 

What killed me the most was how much everyone seemed to love Hannah. "Hannah is the sweetest girl I've ever met!" they'd say. "She's just so on fire for God and it really shows," they'd declare. "Hannah's such a great Christian!" As people would say this, I would wonder what they saw in her. I wondered what actions Hannah committed that made her appear to be the exemplary Christian. How could everyone love her, when she was so hateful towards me? (I of course later realized that by thinking such things that I was in fact no better than Hannah herself.)

For awhile, my fleshly nature got the better of me. I vented to a few people about how much I despised Hannah. This ended up being my partial theme song:

And this one, too, though not in a practical manner; it just somewhat captured my emotions:

....Not a proud moment for me, I must admit. I let this hatred (let's venture to call it that) boil within me until I couldn't loathe Hannah any more than I already did. But then, after a substantial amount of time, this Bible verse came to me:

If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? 

~ 1 John 4:20 (NKJV)

And then this one, also from 1 John, this time chapter 3, verse 15:

Anyone who hates another brother or sister is really a murderer at heart. And you know that murderers don't have eternal life within them. 

Well, let me just say, that is surely a blow. I surely wouldn't have gone up to Hannah, gun in hand, and shot her! I'd never even dream of such a thing! Yet I somehow justified my "hatred" of her. How could I do that? I still don't understand myself. Although I eventually felt a strong God-inspired conviction to love Hannah, I did what many people do: I ignored it because it was an inconvenience to me. Knowing how perfectly pushy our Lord can be, He reminded me of the verse where Jesus says that if we don't forgive others, then our Father will, in turn, not forgive us. (This goes back to "you reap what you sow.")

So after some time, I was growing so unhappy with loathing Hannah that I just decided to pray for God to bless her. I didn't really mean it at first. But after awhile, He moved in my heart and He slowly changed me, taking me from hating Hannah to wishing to befriend her and praying good things over her. Among the many things I learned through this experience:

You can't hate Hannah and love the Lord.

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