Someone reminded me today of this quote from C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:
“The rule for us all is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
In my message yesterday, I talked about the motto when I was a summer camp counselor, “Fake it till you feel it.” We didn’t always have the energy or feel like loving the campers, but if we just dove in and “faked it,” it wasn’t long till the feelings caught up to the decision.
The point is that love works best when we make it the rule, the decision, the commitment, the job or the calling rather than what accidentally happens when we happen to feel like it. In other words, we should treat love as dogma.