Respect comes before love

The writer Thomas L Friedman expressed in a TV interview that people want to feel:

CONNECTED – PROTECTED AND RESPECTED.

Brother Wolff gave a very short talk in our church about his relationship to his wife – to whom he has only been married for 5 month.

He was telling about how he his whole life was a “rascal” with long hair and his motorbike.

Then he met his wife not long ago.  He cut his hair and put on a suit and changed his life.

He expressed that he had concluded that the reasons he changed himself inside and out was BECAUSE SHE HAD received  RESPECT AND ACCEPTANCE of "who his was" and that made him wanting to change inside and outside.

He was expressing that he was convinced that RESPECT AND ACCEPT COME BEFORE LOVE.


I have to totally agree with him.

What holds us back from respecting and accepting a person  that we otherwise profess to love?

I personally believe it lies in not totally accepting and therefore not respecting the other persons values - if they are not the same as ours. 

Curt Holman, a teacher at Brigham Young University expressed something similar in his talk 30 July 2013.

He saids that "Respect, love and compassion for other is the key to a good relationship.

So, could it be that Brother Wolff hit it on the nail that: Respect and acceptance should come before love?

If we can respect and accept and have compassion = love for others, in spite of their views and beliefs being different than our, would we then not automatically love them for who they are?

I once met a lady in my church who was born in to the LDS church.  She married a man who was not a member and her parents were extremely worried about how would it work, with two different religious views.

When I met her, she had been married for almost 30 years and was a grandmother and a President of the women’s Relief Society. We were working on a church project together in Vancouver, British Columbia.

I was curious about the differences in her and her husband religious values and I could not help but ask her how it was to be married to somebody who did not have the same belief system and values as herself. Did it not cause problems and conflicts with not understanding each other?

I was very surprised and amazed at her answer: She told me that even though she wished they both were members of the Mormon faith, it had never caused any conflicts or problem in their love for each other, because they had mutual acceptance and respect for each others faiths and values.

In other words

We humans can be different from each other and still love each other, even if we are different from each other.

IF

Respect comes before love.

Vibeke Lindhardt

9 March 2017