A comedian once joked that he loved all of his kids, but there was a couple he just didn’t like. As with all good comedy, the hyperbole is often grounded in truth. To love does not always mean you have to like.

Today relationships seem more littered with eggshells than honesty. Any parent raising children can acknowledge that our love is unconditional, but our children can have behavioral cycles that are just plain unlikable. Parents can explain the reasons we don’t like the child right now, and guide them toward the path of change.

But the modern counselor will tell you to dislike, to critique, and to admonish is to hate. All negativity is to be muted in an all embracing malleable sponge that squishes every action into a mush of acceptability. Defining love as never challenging, never exposing, and never exacting, the new society now is at loss to understand why the new generation of young adults are emotionally paralyzed at the slightest hint of adversity, never acknowledging that they have been programmed to think, if they are not liked, they are not loved but hated.

Ah, then there is the Christian whose words of rebuke are not the loving words of Jesus Christ. The same Christ who fashioned a whip to chase money-changers out of the Temple calling them thieves. He called people liars, hypocrites, dull of wit, slow of heart, children of Satan, and the list goes.

There were lots of people on this earth Christ didn’t like but he loved them all enough to die on cross for them. Christ didn’t accept every act of every person and neither should I. My faith demands that I love all humankind, but I don’t have to like you.

-Andy Torbett