A Word About Hate.

There were never any bad words uttered in my family of origin when I was growing up. My momma made sure of that. Saying normal, run-of-the-mill curse words’ never even crossed my mind, because if words like that slipped out of my mind into my mouth, my mom would have delivered an immediate and almost divine retribution. We didn’t utter curse words in our house.

She had other words on the forbidden-to-use list, too. For example, she wanted me to be careful how I used that word hate. I never entertained the thought of inserting a person’s name in the blank after hate. You don’t hate people. “People are created in God’s image, and to hate someone would be a grievous sin,” my momma said. “We don’t hate people,” 

It did seem to be permissible to hate other annoyances, however. For example, mosquito bites were okay to hate, just not the mosquitoes themselves. When I was young, mosquitoes used to eat me up. When I scratched a mosquito bite and it became red and sore, I could express my hate, while my mother put ointment on the bite. But, I remember my mother’s corrective rejoinder if I said, “I hate mosquitoes.” She had what seemed to me a particular theology about mosquitoes, a sort of circuitous logic that seemed to envelop everything from the tiniest insect to the largest of animals. “Do you know why God made mosquitoes?” she would ask.

I hated it when she asked me questions I didn’t have a good answer for.

“Well,” she would say,” God made mosquitoes so the frogs would have something to eat. If there were no mosquitoes, the poor little frogs would have nothing to eat.”

While I knew better than to argue with my mother, deep inside where she couldn’t look, I also knew that her logic must be flawed. If God created one thing so another thing would have something to eat—if God created mosquitoes so frogs would have something to eat—then it seemed to me that the next logical step in that proposed food chain was that I was created so that the mosquitoes would have something to eat, and that just didn’t seem to be right. Intuitively, I knew I had a deeper reason for being that providing nourishment for mosquitoes. I didn’t argue, though. I just let it go at hating mosquito bites.

There are all sorts of things I guess you could say I mildly hate now that I’m grown: ball-point pens that skip, flashlights that don’t work, faucets that continually drip, cars that break-down, the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

I don’t know what God would think of my list of things I hate. But, when I compare things I hate with things He hates? I’m convinced that I have a lot more important things than mosquitoes that may be eating me up to worry about. How about you?

“These six things the LORD hates,

Yes, seven are an abomination to him:

A proud look,

A lying tongue,

Hands that shed innocent blood,

A heart the devises wicked plans,

Feet that are swift in running to evil,

A false witness who speaks lies,

And one who sows discord among brethren.”

(Prov. 6:16-19)