Faith Time: Loving strangers

MOBILE, Ala. (WRKG) — Faith Time is our weekly conversation on matters of faith. Joining us this morning is Titus Thorne with Big Zion AME Zion Church in Mobile. We’ve got Valentine’s Day coming up this week, and we want to talk a little bit about the difference between godly love and worldly love. How do you see it?

Guest: Godly love is unconditional. You know, It’s selfless. Godly love is free. It doesn’t cost anything. And it originates from a higher power, which is God. And God gives it to everyone.

Anchor: How can we be less self-focused when we show love to others?

Anchor: We can be less self-focused by cultivating empathy, putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, and realizing that we could be in the same position and thinking about their perception, living from their perspective on how they view life. And we could be in the same situation.

Anchor: Why are these actions sometimes difficult?

Guest: Well, the difficult because we’ve always been taught to take care of ourself first and we affirm this. So we take care of us. So first we forget about the self-interest of others. And sometimes let’s put them behind us and we forget about there are other people that are coming right behind us.

Anchor: Why is it important to, for example, show love to strangers? And in what ways do you think we can do that?

Guest: Well, it’s very important that we do show love to strangers. I don’t believe there are strangers. We are created in the Imago day, which is the image of God, and all of us are the same. But somehow or another, through the fall of humankind, we all begin to judge. We’re not looking at each other differently. But when we think about it, God carried us in his image and his greatness.

And so there are no strangers that I see. But so I do understand that we do treat them differently. But that’s because of implicit biases that we have developed over time. Yeah.

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