Sad day.  The final goodbye to Mary Lou's beautiful life.  Scott drove me to western Oklahoma for the service.  It was nice to spend time with him.  We recalled a million stories.  He is my Bible scholar--and is always coming up with interesting new things I never thought about.  His Bible exploration came late, but as a result is fresh.  Seen with un-indoctrinated eyes.

Ecclesiastes 3:8 "A time to love, and a time to hate."   There is an old saying, "Love the person; hate the deed."

To be honest, I don't have the capacity to love all persons.  I think only God can do that.  I just love some of the people I know.  And some of the ones I love, I don't really like.  Real love must be accompanied by caring behaviors--giving a person your time, your ear, your prayers.  You can't stretch yourself around very many people if you do all that.

When it says, "A time to love..." perhaps God is recognizing that we can love people during the "time" that we are in contact with them.  There have been people in my life that I truly cared about that I am no longer in contact with.  I treasure their memory, but you move on when you move on.  Perhaps what God is saying is that time is fleeting and there is "a time" in which you are able to give love to someone.  That "the time to love" is a fleeting thing.  You love when you have opportunity.

A friend that I knew long ago wrote me to say that she wished we could have our Bible Study with each other again.  "That time is gone...I don't live there anymore," is what I wrote her.  "We had that time together.  Take what you learned and pass it on to someone else."  Love is meant to be shared.

But "hate" is selective.  When I think of the word "hate," I always associate it with actions, not people.  With things people do.  And things that groups of people believe in and act upon.  There is so much evil in this world.  I hate it.  It makes me sick when I read in the newspaper about what some person has done to another person.  They are sin-sick.  The only real cure is giving your life to Jesus--for Him to change you from the inside out.  The world wants to rehabilitate you from the outside in.  Which doesn't work in the long run.  It just covers up the problem.