Love has Poise

Love has Poise 有愛的人能自處

Love is not boastful, arrogant, or rude. 愛是不自誇，不張狂，不做害羞的事

Boasting is a way of trying to look good when we suspect we are not good. To get other's respect, reassurance, support, we create an image out of our symbols (things we wear, cars, the people we want to be seen with, the offices we try to win), to distort reality so we can grab our praise that we suspect we cannot earn.

Arrogance is an anxious grasp for power when we fear that we are weak. It is power without authenticity or authority. If we have authentic knowledge, we have intellectual power. If we have authentic leadership skills and a mandate to lead, we have power to lead. Such authentically based power is good. Arrogant people stride into prominent places; make decisions for groups and assume the others will follow. They use people as stepping-stones to power. The arrogant parent manipulates the child to feel powerful (psychological and moral power), look and feel good. Worse yet, the child is being educated not in love but in manipulation, and is learning that what counts are not what you are, but what you can do to get control of people.

Arrogance leads us to assume to be the Creator, a god, independent, self-reliant, and this leaves us empty at the center, as we are then attacked by fear and anxiety. We are worried that we lack the power to become what our pride makes us think we are. We can never get enough power to fill the soul's needs or enough to overcome the fear that we deserve less than we are getting. Arrogance causes rudeness.

Rudeness is putting people down in order to try to hold us up. Crude people have not learned the manners of society, but rude people are so anxious to stay upright he bruise anyone who threatens them.

All three result from a loss of balance that comes when we are empty at the center .

Love is the power of poise because it provides ballast at the center of our lives.

Humility , the opposite of arrogance and boasting., a willingness to accept the real relationship between God and oneself. It is the strength of accepting one's status as a dependent creature – an invaluable, responsible, creative person, but still a creature who needs the energy of God to exist at all.

Humility is the grace to accept oneself before God as a sinner, and to plead for and accept forgiveness. This self-acceptance in humility is blessed with the gift to acknowledge God as Creator and Savior. In realism we admit our private emptiness, so that the center of our lies can be filled by the Spirit of Christ. We admit weakness and claim strength at the same time. Realism relievs us of the need to boast and be arrogant because it frees us from having to fill our inner emptiness by others' praise or our own power. Our emptiness is filled by God.

A person who sets her heart on great things is high-minded . Sensing her own potential, she gracefully moves out toward achievement of good and notable things. She does not fear recognition or despise honor. Indeed, she likes what is truly honourable, worthy of honor, and so does not refuse honor out of false modesty. High-minded people also appreciate power, because there are many good things one cannot get done without power, seeking power to do good for others.

Love is not arrogant, but love can be high-minded.

Love has poise, the power to stand up straight. "Poise" originally referred to the weight placed in the center of a sailing ship for balance. By ourselves, without God, we are too light at the center, we boast, and become arrogant and rude in the hope praise from others and power over others will act as external braces to make up for lack of centered weight. Poise suggests security and grace and freedom from worries about stumbling and making a fool of you. It is God's love that gives us centered weight on the inside. It gives us poise not by telling us we cannot fall, but by assuring us that if we do he will set us right again . As the love of God keeps coming into us from outside, we can forget about our emptiness and move on toward others. As we realize that ourselves do not generate our power, God begins to fill us with himself and his love. As long as we love, the promise that gives us poise is sure: " God abides in us and his love is perfected in us" (1 John 4:12 ).

撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes