**Let love be without dissimulation.** Romans 12;9
Fake it ’til you make it is a popular phrase being thrown around by authors, YouTubers, and Tweeters in recent years.
The idea is that if one, for example, wants to be a fearless public speaker, she should go ahead and speak in public as often as possible even though she is terrified to stand before others. The practice of speaking in public to small or large groups over and over again will eventually help her overcome her fear. Until her fear has been conquered, she can move forward applying this principle. She will fake it. She will pretend that she’s not afraid to speak in public until she really isn’t afraid.
Fake it till you make it.
Love is an action word.
Today we are looking at True Love from a point of sincerity.
Google definitions tells us that to dissimulate means—to disguise or conceal under a false appearance.
Our love should not be phony, false, or faked. We should not pretend to love others or live behind a facade of kindness and grace. It should be real and transparent that we truly care about people.
Yet, I don’t believe that this discards the idea of fake it till you make it when it comes to love. Because I believe that love is an action word, something we’ll talk about in a future post. Emotions do create actions, but, sometimes actions have to come before emotions.
When we counsel couples for marital problems or in premarital counseling, we explain to them that love is not a guarantee that both partners are feeling happy, mushy, sweet, romantic or tingly towards each other all the time. If the emotion of love dissipates, the conscious actions of loving your partner can eventually rekindle the emotions of love. One may not feel love or be in love with their partner, but treating them with respect, serving them, being grateful for their positive traits, learning to forgive, and to be merciful will show them love, and eventually bring back the spark of emotional love.
To explain it in a more nitty-gritty way….
Let’s say that you like kickboxing. You prepare yourself for a workout and after warming up, you start to kick the big bag for kicking thingy. I have no idea what that’s called.
Anyway, you launch out the first kick, and then a second, 3rd and 4th. You continue kicking in a conscious, logical, determined way, but what often happens is the repetition of kicking a bag helps to unsurface deep stress and even anger. Sooner or later you’re not kicking for exercise, now, you’re kicking to get rid of inner rage. So, the initial steps are not emotional, they may even be indifferent. You just start going through the motions because the objective is the workout. Once you get rolling, your emotions take over. Your emotions become involved in the activity.
So it is with True Love. In a perfect world, we are not supposed to demonstrate a phony, hypocritical love to others. But if we struggle to love from our heart, there is a way to fix that.
We can just treat people the way they should be treated. Forgive the way we would want to be forgiven. Speak kindly the way we would want others to speak to us. In time, your heart will become involved as well.
So if you’re just not feeling it today. Fake it till you make it.
Be kind. Be merciful. Do something nice for your partner or your children or your neighbor.
Tomorrow may be a better day.
**My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.**1John 3:18