When we have not grown up in a positive, purposefully-encouraging home, anger abounds and it is very difficult to fathom that love is a choice.
Love is a choice.
In the small, petty, angry state of frustration with the people around us, the smallest slight can easily offend.
Sometimes, uncontrollable anger can come from electrolyte deficiency or from toxins, like arsenic, stuck in the body from farming mistakes made down the road from your home a century ago. When it rains and floods, hundred-year-old chemicals that don’t rot spread around, even into the garden you eat from and the mud children play in. These things affect every person in every nation of the world, especially America, which developed technology before health and safety laws.
The first and most important step in addressing the toxin and nutrient factor is logic: Saying that chemicals or lack of nutrition could explain anger is never an insult—neither when others say it to you nor when you say it to others. Once you sink that truth into your heart, do your own research because it is a factor, though we always retain a free will in the matter of love.
Learning to love requires time and exhaustion, as with strengthening any muscle. Like a democracy, you must strive to keep your freedom to choose love. It is a constant, proactive, concerted effort. Everyone in the home must agree or else emotions will be toxic with hatred.
It’s not about preventing truthful words that “make waves”, but about recognizing venom injected into those words, not spitting venom back at people who use venom, and the belief that “counting your blessings” isn’t just propaganda.
Focus on the things that are good, helpful, encouraging, and provide a path forward.
Critiques are wonderful, especially harsh critiques; what marks the good and bad is whether the critique includes a way to solve every problem cited. Even when someone gives you a candid critique with no solution, your choice to love means you thank the person, genuinely search-out the blessing in the wrapping, and not silence the person in the name of keeping a “positive attitude”.
The contagious choice to love needs nutrition, not quarantine.
Deuteronomy 30:19-20, Proverbs 9:8, Philippians 4:8, Colossians 3:2, 1 John 4:7-8