Love Without Offense

Reflections on the seeming complexities of love.

When reflecting on the seeming complexities of love, contrasting the nemesis of love seems appropriate. Offending or being offended is not something one can do with love. It challenges our love and tempts us with unforgiveness and bitterness.

When offense rears its ugly head, love gets stuffed down into forgotten compartments within ourselves. When we get offended, emotions like anger, wrath, and hatred come forth, as we seek to protect and get vengeance for ourselves and loved ones.

What is Love?

It takes a special person to not get offended when others do. They have learned to overcome the temptation of anger by passing over the offense.

Most of us get offended somewhat easily. When this happens we realize how conditional the love we give is. Are we only loving those who love us back? That seems to be the natural reaction for most people.

What is love then? Is it simply a conditional behavior we extend to those who love us back? Is it possible to love those who don’t reciprocate, and why would we do this?

As we all know, there are times when those we love offend us. While we can mostly avoid offensive strangers (or not care what they say), inevitably, those close to us will offend us (pressing our proverbial buttons).

Being offended by those in our confidence or at work is often worse than when a stranger offends us. Offenses can threaten to derail relationships and create long-standing resentments and grudges.

If offense wasn’t a nasty thing, love would flourish without restraint!

We could love others without any worry of being offended. It would make life much easier.

The Offended Problem

The problem is there are more offenses in the world than love.

Maybe love is complicated and needs offense to provide the contrast.

If offense was gone then love would be the default behavior. Love is kind, patient, tender-hearted, easily entreated, and true.

People who are devoid or lacking love tend to spend their time and effort offending others. They are resentful for not receiving enough love, for being the victim of offense, so they extract it out of those whom they see as having too much love and not enough offense.

Just because someone is victimized (offended), doesn’t mean they have to be resentful and extract it from innocent people who seem to have too much love and not enough offense. The hurt person doesn’t have to even the playing field.

The hurt and offended could overcome their offense by being happy for those who haven’t had to endure the same offense and by helping those who have. The only way to help is to show the offended how to love instead of offending.

Conclusion

Everyone is subjected to being offended. How we deal with the offenses of life will determine how effective we are in our efforts. Marriage is full of offenses we have to overcome. Love is the result of this overcoming.

Love is simple and easy, figuring out how to overcome offenses is the hard part.

Forgiveness and patience are needed for love to find a place in our hearts. If we don’t have these, our hearts will be full of offenses, resentments, bitterness, and hatred.

Everyone in our life (including ourselves) will disappoint us (offend us) eventually. Our efforts to love people will depend on our ability to overcome these offenses that inevitably happen in our daily lives.

While love is simple, relationships are not because of offenses. In order to appreciate and foster love, learning to be patient and forgiving is key to overcoming offense. Until then, unconditional true love will continue to allude the unforgiving offended.

Originally published at Vocal

Follow on Substack

Comments

HubPages vs. Vocal

Gaining Context I opened my account at Vocal around two years ago when I published my first article. It was a syndicated article from my golf blog, which surprisingly has done better than all other articles since. Around three months ago, I decided to give Vocal a real chance with a renewed effort and by becoming a Vocal Plus member. They enticed me with half off a year’s membership ($50 for a year, usually it is $99 annually or $10/month). Since this renewed effort, I have published nine articles; six were written originally at Vocal (four were for Vocal Challenges), and the other 3 were syndicated from elsewhere. The plan for Vocal was to publish my creative writing there originally, which meant I had to switch from HubPages where these were published originally before. The distracting ads and lackluster RPM helped make this decision, although I’ve been writing on HP for over a decade. After three months of “working” Vocal, I’ve realized it isn’t worth paying the $10/month. I’ll expl...

What I Learned From My Most Popular Article on Medium

It was an experiment I didn’t mean to happen. When I first published the article back in 2018, the Medium Partner Program was open to everyone despite their following status. All you had to do was sign up for it with Stripe, which I did, earning my pennies every month while not paying too much attention to it. Only recently have I rediscovered Medium and noticed one of my articles actually did pretty well just sitting here without much love from me. Here it is: A Guide to Winter Fishing on the Oregon Coast And why wouldn’t it when it has such a fetching picture — that is a huge fish! And the pipe is a nice touch, very authentic. Actually, this is a piece I wrote for a client that was rejected. In hindsight, I’m grateful to have this article/guide as my own. If you read it you’ll see I put a lot of work into it, especially considering I didn’t know a lot about fishing in the winter on the Oregon Coast (I can barely catch a fish in a stocked pond). At this point you may ...

Attention Seeking in the Hive Mind Collective

Losing and finding motivation in a fake online world. The perception of reality is what rules the online world, yet reality is what we have to face in our flesh and bone lives. How does the perception change the reality of our lives? The spinning stimulus the online world creates in our minds, balloons the creative ideas and then sends them shooting out the sides of the tornado. Catching these fleeting ideas and taking the time to express them becomes too arduous in a world of changing themes in the translucent hive mind concept. Before the methodical writer chews on the idea and takes the time to process them into a clarifying expression, the winds of change blow in thousands more that distract and override the initial project. The bots and human hackers, plying for greatness and attention, clamoring for a slice of the fake bot pie, have already exhausted every avenue of thought the masses are cornered into considering from social engineering tactics. Attention is scarce, and more so ...

An Ode to Grandpa Lee

An old-time pioneer amid modern vanity and "progress." The man stood tall in the wind with the sun beating down on his flat-brim cowboy hat. He was a working man, focused on his pioneer family in the western country they called home. Building and designing structures high and wide, the man skipped across wooden beams high in the air, under shadows cast only by moving clouds; wide open spaces watched the scene as death-defying feats were carried out in relative obscurity, as just another day of work. The man was an old-timer with relatively few years to boast, a before his time pioneer with an adventurous and loving wife plotting business in sagebrush lands far beyond the hyped city life bustling with seemingly meaningless activities. His skin was as leather, scorched in the sun and beaten with high winds containing drifting sand mixed with alkaline dirt. The dry mountain air in the high desert cleansed his heart with comfortable respite from the high temps and harsh weather e...

Business and Society Articles

Search This Blog