Pride or Love

I've heard it said that Satan's greatest accomplishment is convincing so many that he doesn't exist.  I think that is probably pretty on point.  I think that he has accomplished another great task that is subverting the Faith and the Faithful though, and that is his "redefinition" and "perversion" of the true meaning of love.  Or have we done that ourselves?  In attempts to be loving are we undermining what it means to love in the first place?

The highest and virtual kind of love that we should all be aspiring too, is the sacrificial love of God the Father and Our Lord Jesus Christ.  It is an action, it is not a sentimental feeling of warmth and acceptance.  True love can be anything but.  True love is the Cross of Christ.  True love takes effort and difficulty and yes, sacrifice.  So, has Satan distorted the meaning of love, or have we just gotten lazy and prideful and done it ourselves, because true love is difficult and requires humility, a lack of pride that too many of us refuse to relinquish.

It's not a mistake that the LGBTQ movement refers to its actions as "Pride" and celebrate pride as their "virtue".  Pride is actually the most evil and destructive of all the vices.  It is the opposite of humility, and devoid of real love.  Real love, or willing the good of others, will stand in adversity to vice and sin.  Real, virtuous love will call sin out, not tolerate and even celebrate it.  When we pridefully take the glorious gifts, especially the gifts of our sexuality, and distort them and use them instead of for His glory, but for our own pleasure, greed, desire, and self satisfaction, we are not practicing the love most required of us by God himself - to love Him above everything and everyone else.

Same sex attraction is real.  We all have our struggles and proclivities toward evil and sin.  True love and virtue though can cause us to rise above the actions those tendencies and temptations arouse in us and propel us toward virtue and holiness.  It is exactly in that defiance of evil that we find virtue and holiness and rise above the temporal into the supernatural.  The true heroes among us are not the ones who rally for sin and pride, but those who defy it and rally against at great cost to themselves.  Because that is the sacrifice that Christ expects of us.  Sure, we will be called hateful, homophobic and every other horrible name in the book, we will be accused of intolerance.  I am okay with being intolerant of sin.  We will be called judgmental, but we are called to judge actions and the differences between right and wrong, goodness and evil.  It is the precise reason we are here on this earth and on this journey.  We are making judgements and choices that will ultimately lead us to Heaven or Hell.

Ignorance is a wonderful thing for Satan, and our emotions coupled with that have distorted and perverted love.  Don't be duped.  Embrace the goodness and purity that God has created for us in all its glory.  It's not the easy way, it's not the popular way - it will get you persecuted.  It got the early martyrs killed.  It got Christ killed.  That is okay though, because we are not interested in the things and desires of this Earth, we are made for Heaven, and it is only true and virtuous love that will get us there, and last for all of eternity.