A Baby Panda   

“An acquaintance merely enjoys your company, a fair-weather companion flatters when all is well, a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

I was watching TV several days ago and there was a story about the newest baby panda to be born at a zoo in the United States. It was the first day for the panda to be seen by the world.  He and his mother had come out of their den to see a totally different world.  He was basically a big ball of black and white fur.  In one segment of the video they showed him sitting by his mother and then he lost his balance as babies often do and he proceeded to roll off the rock ledge to the bottom.  It looked like he instinctively did the tuck and roll thing because once he hit the bottom he sat up and looked around.  His mother was sitting at the top enjoying a bamboo shoot and ignoring the tumble her baby took. 

Watching nature is one of my favorite past times because it always amazes me how God created the creatures around us.  This reminded me of the sermon at our church on Sunday.  Our pastor was talking about the two sides of love.  There is tender love and there is tough love.  I think the mother panda was doing a little tough love as she let the baby roll down the hill and ignored him.  She didn’t run down the hill to see if he was injured, or pick him up and try to console him.   

We are called as Christians to practice both tough love and tender love.  There are circumstances in life where we are to practice one or the other.  The problem with this is that how we handle either one of these can either break or build up another human being.  I have a tendency to lean more on the side of tender love.  That is not always a good thing because certain times call for tough love and that doesn’t always come naturally to me. 

The thing that our pastor said that struck me was that tough love means that when we see another Christian taking a wrong path, our love for that person should be such that we confront them with love and how we handle and give tough love can make or break that person.

Tough love is not about breaking the person down.  It is about loving the person enough to approach them with kindness and love to talk about the tough things. It is also about determining what our motive is, the importance of the issue and then praying about it.  We have to evaluate all of these things to determine if tough love is necessary.

I admit I am not good at expressing tough love. The majority of the time I avoid it because I don’t want to hurt another person’s feelings.  The reality is that I am called by God to give tough love when necessary.  I am going to work on this as it is a weakness of mine.

Prayer for the Day: Heavenly Father, I am not good at expressing tough love.  Please teach me how to give tough love the way You want it to be expressed.  Help me to work on this weakness.  I want to show others that I love them and that they are important to me but most important, they are important to You.  The way I handle tough love can make or break a person. 

Scripture:  And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ— from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love. Ephesians 4:11-16