Is Your Love Parasitism?

Ed Welch, in When People Are Big and God Is Small, p. 182-183:

Scott Peck, in his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled, suggests that we can shape other people into host organisms. It is not a pretty picture: people are the intestine, we are the worm.

"I do not want to live. I cannot live without my husband [wife, girlfriend, boyfriend], I love him [or her] so much." And when I respond, as I frequently do, "You are mistaken; you do not love your husband [wife, girlfriend, boyfriend]." "What do you mean?"is the angry question. "I just told you I can't live without him [or her]." I try to explain. "What you describe is parasitism, not love."

People are our cherished idols. We worship them, hoping they will take care of us, hoping they will give us what we feel we need. What we really need are biblical shapes and identities for other people. Then, instead of needing people to fill our desires, we can love people for the sake of God's glory and fulfill the purpose for which we were created.

For me this last step is the hardest. It is not so hard to understand what the Bible says about people—everyone knows that we are supposed to love them—but it is difficult to apply this knowledge. Loving others makes life less comfortable. It means that I give up my own agenda for a Saturday morning in order to help a neighbor. It means that I get hurt more when someone moves away. It means that people stay at our house when I would prefer to be surrounded with just my immediate family.

Isn't that just like God's Word? Just when we think we have adapted it to a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, it messes everything up. It tells us to love others in the same way that we have been loved by God.