NeoZine

To Be Grown-up

“Act like men!” God says. That surely is one of the most concise and poignant statements of God’s Love Ethics in the Bible. Three words capture the difference between depravity and redemption, emotional sickness and health, uselessness and significance: act like men. If the writer lived in today’s political correctness it would be phrased at both sexes: “Grow up!” The rest of the quote explains it:

Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love. – 1 Corinthians 16:13–14

These concepts go together: alertness, resolve, “grow up!” and strength. But how does “love” fit? These thoughts seem so disjointed: all about power…then love? Either these concepts are incompatible, or our understanding is wrong.

This is a three-part series which tries to clarify what it means to “act like men!” It means means understanding God’s plan for growth, which is immediately helpful to all Christians, but it also applies to Christian parents trying to lead their children into maturity. It may require some effort to study this material, but it comes with a great promise: to end the confusion about love means converting painful emotional defeats and struggles into astonishing victories. We begin with the most foundational but hard-to-believe points…

From God’s viewpoint love is the most potent and victorious force in the universe. God proves this in practice: although He is omnipotent (all-powerful), this is not His weapon of choice against a universe in rebellion. If humans held such omnipotence, all personal conflicts would be quickly resolved, but nobody would be left alive on earth!

We foolishly think strength and victory comes from smashing the opposition. The Romans built an empire this way, and even today the Hollywood heroes are those great killers like Clint Eastwood. With glowering eyes and chewing a dead cigar, this cold-hearted killer always wins, or so it seems. But it must be remembered he holds a .44 Magnum, which is impractical for the office or home. Clint also has serious relationship issues. When Clint arrives, the streets vacate, and those who remain are soon dead.

Clint actually lives in a simplistic and childish world where pulling a trigger makes problems disappear, and at the end of his movies he rides away all alone. Psychologists identify similar behavior in “parallel play,” a phenomena seen in little kids in the same room who play by themselves, “parallel playing” and oblivious to each other. This occurs because these children are too immature to understand how to participate in a world outside their own.

God’s strength is loving strength, and extremely victorious. He is always loving, even when dealing with rebellion and hatred. “Love never fails,” the Bible says. To “act like men” means living the way God does, and it means victory is an expected way of life.

All the above points are lost on Infantiles. We need to begin by addressing the fundamental immaturities of the Infantile, because this is where everyone starts in their journey towards Mature Love. People may mature beyond Infantile Love, but they retain vestiges of those immaturities well into adulthood, and would be well-advised to understand what Infantile looks like.

In the process of studying Infantiles, it is necessary to distinguish between Tribal Infantiles and Diffuse Infantiles. Infantiles operate differently in Tribal and Diffuse Love Spheres.

Punks and Sissies

Love is equated with softness because love is misunderstood from our earliest years.

One of the heartbreaks for parents is to watch your sweet, tender child heading into the torment and bruises sure to come from all those schoolyard bullies out there. How sad it is that loving kids from loving homes are the most easily victimized by bullies! Even more tragic, those kids from loveless, abusive homes are less likely to be victimized, and more likely to be victimizers.

This ought not to be, it seems: does love strengthen or not? Does not a loving home provide the best chance for success in life? Yes it can, and kids from a loving home can become phenomenally powerful if they don’t become punks or sissies! As adolescence dawns, kids discover the love they learned at home made them weak: either as Punks or Sissies.

The Punk is fully convinced of his own significance. The little boy was so significant to mommy, he melted her heart! But “out there” where the bad guys roam, nobody cares for this kid’s feelings. He is insignificant and feels insignificant. Knowing how wrong this is, the kid acts like a punk and demands to be treated with the significance he knows he deserves!

• The Punk is a Tribal Infantile. He is obsessed with his own significance, unjustified though it may be. His towering view of himself is unrealistic because he’s never been tested outside the home.

The Sissy from a loving home tries so hard to be sweet. Full of frothy, warm, pointless emotions, the sissy can’t find anyone who responds like mommy did back home. To be nice with the bullies of the world means to get pushed around. By late adolescence the sissy either learns a different approach or becomes extremely despised by peers.

• The Sissy is also a Tribal Infantile, but unlike the Punk, the Sissy is obsessed with the need for emotional warmth in order to make life work. Significance comes from feeling loved, whereas the Punk’s significance comes from being treated like the king he was at home.
• Sympathetic parents keep trying to pour more love into their sissy kid to counter-balance all that hatred, but they fail to realize “those mean kids out there” are not entirely wrong: a sissy is a weakling who must change.

Consider God’s Word on the weakness of childhood:

We are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; – Ephesians 4:14 (NASB)

Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature. – 1 Corinthians 14:20 (NASB)

For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn’t know how to do what is right. – Hebrews 5:13 (NLT)

Children are weak, easily dominated, ignorant, and poor at thinking things through, according to those verses. When someone remains childish past childhood years, punk or sissy are fitting labels. It is time to grow up!

The contradiction between childish love and biblical love means kids emerge from their homes with a weak and defective definition of love destined to fail in the real world. Childish love only works in a highly restricted place where few others are involved. Childish love brings naive expectations into the larger world and is terribly hurt when people don’t respond as they did back home.

The Tribal Trap

The “Tribal Home” is the production factory for Punk and Sissy Infantiles. Their home is a strong fortress against the uncertainties of the outside world. Everyone inside is furiously building and expanding this domain through career-paths, education, house-building, car-care and fighting a mountain of bills. Despite these ominous pressures, it is a safe home where kids feel loved and significant.

Dr. Ankenman used the term “Tribal” to describe the phenomena seen in primitive cultures where members of other tribes are often viewed as sub-human, commonly using their tribal name as the word for “human being.” Tribal people have little interest or experience relating to people from other tribes, and outside contact is limited to superficial business or diplomacy. This same ancient tribal pattern is evident today in American suburbia.

But this supposedly-safe Tribal Home is actually a breeding-ground of dangerous minds:

• The American Tribal Home is building a repository of insignificance and disillusionment. There is no power or significance in the Kosmos! How foolish to build a fortress against the Kosmos by embracing the values of the Kosmos! All this effort is merely building a trite realm of insignificant busywork, and is little more than a curse: “Through painful toil,” God said about the Kosmos, “it will produce thorns and thistles for you!” Is anything more insignificant than thorns and thistles? This is a fortress of heartbreak underway. The “god of this world has blinded the minds” of his subjects, reducing people to slaves plodding through life, yet loving it, and the Tribal Home is merely raising another crop of mindless slaves.
• In the Tribal Home people form few relationships and can get trapped, remaining loyal to an unhealthy extent in destructive relationships. When all the emotional needs are expected to be satisfied within the Tribe, it creates an atmosphere suffocated by Love Demands which become normative. People living in such a narrow world often have no idea how very strange or unhealthy their relationships are.
• Hyper-control often marks the Tribal Home, and kids carry the effects for life. The Tribal home is necessarily dominated by someone with the strength of will to guard the Tribe’s perimeters and maintain the Tribe’s customs. This can have a devastating effect on kids. Punks, for example, try to exercise that hyper-control in the outside world, but never knows why those relationships fail or why intense conflict seems to follow everywhere. Sissies grow incredibly fearful outside the control of their Tribal Home.
• When adolescents wander outside the Tribal Home, they suffer the shock of Tribal Naivete. It’s a much different world at work “out there,” and they can become easy prey for predators, or cannot handle conflict successfully. They leave a trail of broken, disillusioned relationships.
• Punks are kids bathed in love and security, but never taught thankfulness. Doctor Ankenman calls this handicap, the Little Napolean Syndrome.

If you don’t teach your kids gratitude, you might as well be feeding them poison. The more you invest in them, the more poison you feed them, and you end up raising Little Napoleans. The problem is that parents lie: they made the kid feel significant simply for existing. – Ankenman interview

• Some emerge from the Tribal Home struggling with anxiety, or Tribal Fear, because they cannot build enough emotional closeness with anyone to feel the security they once felt in the Tribal Home.

“Panic attacks could be described as rational views of the world: it is a dangerous place and there are no guarantees for safety. Rather, it is those we call ‘well-adjusted’ who hold an irrational view of the world, because they feel ‘I’m immune’ even though they aren’t. But this only goes to show that emotions are irrational, and love is irrational, and when someone feels loved they can make irrational assumptions because they feel safe.” – Ankenman Interview

• Others struggle with depression from Tribal Guilt:

“This is someone who says, ‘I know that if I’m nice to someone, they’re nice in return.’ It always worked in the home. So when she encounters someone different who is not so nice—say, a group of inner-city kids who don’t respond the same way—she thinks it’s her fault. She did something wrong.” – Ankenman Interview

Those adventurous but wayward adolescents return later as defeated adults in order to feel loved. It is a terrible trap, because when these kids have kids, they pass along the dysfunctional and strange rules which don’t work outside the Tribe.

Naive Tribal Versus the Bad Guys

The greatest weakness in the Tribal Home is the way love is defined by human fears and not God’s Word. Tribalism turns a home into a place where small-minded rules and strange traditions define the Tribe. It is a childish and fearful place, but the fear is justified because Tribal members are naive about dealing with the “super-bad guys” in the real world.

Solutions are simplistic. Punks lash-out with hair-trigger anger, like Clint and his .44 Magnum. They get isolated like Clint, too. Sissies placate with pretty smiles, or suffer silently and slide into Clint’s pillar of strength mode—Martyr Mode—which pretends to be strong and unaffected. Unlike a real martyr, however, the Sissy is suffering from impotence, not strength of conviction. “Dumb Sacrifice” is a better term.

The Tribal world cloaks the harshness of reality. Punks and Sissies grow up in a loving home which does not fit the world they encounter, so they get surprised and disillusioned. They need to learn how to deal victoriously with mean, demanding people, and not with the Punk’s Slash-and-Burn approach nor the Sissy’s Dumb Sacrifice. Both approaches aggravate the “super-bad-guys” still more.

Naive Failures

In my mid-forties I was in a situation suddenly surrounded by four cop cars and a K-9 unit of German shepherds! Ten cops emerged from the cars and dust and advanced menacingly towards where I stood with a few friends completely dumbfounded. We were merely praying together on a nearby park bench and were about to leave when all these cops and lights and guns and night-sticks magically appeared because some curious cop saw my son’s toy gun sitting on the back seat of my car. When we approached he called for backup, and what backup he received!

The cops moved in and grabbed us, ordering us to “Place your hands on your heads…”

One guy was indignant: “Do you know who I am!?” he demanded loudly. “I am a Christian leader! I am an upright, tax-paying citizen…” but he never got to finish the sentence. Two cops slammed him against a car into the spread-eagle position for searching.

It was a memorable event, and how many times we laughed at the guy who said, “Do you know who I am?” What a naive thing to say! He truly believed his righteous indignation would intimidate men with guns and clubs!

Punks and sissies share a common approach to life: one demands, the other suffers silently, but both are naive. The love and acceptance in the Tribal Home produces kids with a common, false assumption: “Don’t you know who I am!?” Like those cops, the world answers in return: “No, we don’t!”

Bullies and Tramps

While parents watch their sweet, sweet children grow into Punks and Sissies, another class of citizens are coming to meet them: Bullies and Tramps. Unlike Punks and Sissies, these kids know very little about the warmth of a secure home, or their home was anything but loving. A growing population of homeless souls is now emerging from among the “Millennial Generation” as they’re known, but these Bullies and Tramps have always existed.

Bullies are much like Punks, but far more brutal. If punks are the Little Napoleons of the schoolyard, Bullies are the Genghis Khans from Outer Mongolia. Uprooted and homeless, knowing or caring little about love, these lawless souls are on a pillaging quest to satisfy their wandering desires. Bullies thrive on Negative Love Feelings, which are powerful emotional jolts that come by theft—usually domination. Bullies get a perverse kick out of dominating Punks and watching Sissies squirm. Bullies are often themselves brutalized in some fashion, and they pass it on.

Tramps are emotional vagabonds in need of shelter. Uprooted and homeless like Bullies, Tramps are perhaps more dangerous because they prey on the hearts of the Tribal Naive who need to be loved so badly. Unlike Bullies who care only for their own exploits, Tramps will dive into someone’s heart, form a relationship and steal whatever love feelings they can before moving on to the next victim. At lightening speed they start and cut relationships with little concern for their value.

• Tramps seem sincere because they exude emotional warmth, but these emotions are only residues from the previous victim, and when they run dry, the emotional vagabond begins to steal and demand a fresh supply from its new host. They also carry the baggage of pain and calluses from all their earlier relationships, and this poison inevitably leaks into the current one.
• Not all Tramps are exploiters. Since they survive by stealing love, the reservoirs can dry up, especially if a poor Tramp falls under a Bully’s domain. Some are so relationally depleted they have no strength or confidence to pursue any further emotional exploits. Remember Wanda? The poor girl was reduced to an emotional vagabond without any options.

What horrors await our sweet little Punks and Sissies! Bullies and Tramps are not philosophical concepts, but real flesh-and-blood terrors waiting for those sweet-and-naive children incubating in the warmth of the Tribe.

Diffusion

Bullies and Tramps are the products of what Dr. Ankenman called a Diffuse Love Sphere, which is a fast-paced, electric world of short-but-jolting emotional rewards.

The Diffuse Love Sphere is like the Wild Wild West of the heart. “Westerns” make great popular fiction because the encounters are so emotionally-intense and the stakes are high: every glance, movement or twitch of a finger can bring life or death.

The Diffuse Love Sphere is dominated by lawlessness. While the Tribal Love Sphere is bound in its trite, home-made rules, in Diffuse Love there are no rules. Encounters and feelings matter most, and the only rule is the Rule of Drool — the more mind-numbing and intense is always the more rewarding.

Hollywood is criticized for its many deceptive stereotypes, but it should be praised for its grasp of the Diffuse Love Sphere. (Because Hollywood is filled with Diffuse people?) Watch the “rave” in the opening scene of Blade, or think of those countless Westerns with crazy saloons and bodies flying through swinging doors, and then Diffuse Love becomes clear.

Human depravity leads to Diffuse Love, as we read in Romans 1. “Depraved means “worthless” or “empty” as we studied earlier, and depravity robs human life of its significance. With increasing emptiness and loneliness people enter the Diffuse Love Sphere to steal and assault and grab whatever they can to get significance and love feelings. As Paul describes it, depravity looks like a Hollywood Western:

Being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; – Romans 1:29–31 (NASB)

Diffuse Love feels like the ultimate combination of significance and emotions: feelings are so intense and the stakes are so high, Diffuse Love becomes irresistible and even addictive. The drugs, porn, sexual deviance of all kinds and other lawlessness can be loosely described as love because lawlessness can produce love feelings. Thus Diffuse Love approximates love through Present Love Feelings, as Dr. Ankenman labeled them, and people experience moments of emotional fulfillment when they get their Love Banks filled through Present Love Feelings—but only briefly.

Diffuse Love holds great attraction for Punks and Sissies from Tribal homes because everyone has a legitimate and compelling need for the emotional energy which Present Love Feelings provide. Tribal parents are greatly deceived to think the Tribe will continue to fill the emotional needs of their kids. For kids, Tribal Love is notably absent of Present Love Feelings. The Tribe once produced Present Love Feelings, but God built a timer into that mysterious thing called parental love and it slowly stops filling the Love Bank for kids, even though parents continue to experience Present Love Feelings.

The Diffuse Love Sphere ultimately leads to increasing decay and depravity, creating Bullies and Tramps with a growing history of failure. Present Love Feelings are by nature fleeting emotional experiences, and without something more substantial to contain and invest these feelings—without a good Love Bank—Bullies and Tramps grow diffused and spread across a large number of shallow relationships and emotional experiences. Their behavior grows more malicious and predatory as their failures increase.

Irrational Power

The power of Diffuse Love is its irrational nature. Despite their sad destination, Bullies and Tramps can dominate Punks and Sissies. Tribal kids enter the world armed with homespun traditions, but they fail with Bullies and Tramps cloaked in the power of lawlessness.

All the rules of social etiquette which Tribal parents typically impart to their kids simply make them predictable, easy prey. Parents think these social niceties prepare kids to deal with the adult world, and perhaps there was an age when this worked. But the world today is filled with predators from the Diffuse Love Sphere who can dominate these kids by either appealing to their kindness (as with Sissies), or smashing their rules of fair play (as with Punks).

Clint always wins because he is such a powerful Bully, and his enemies lose because they’re Punks. The opening scene in “Dirty Harry” is classic: “Well, what’s it gonna be, punk? Do you feel lucky?” he asks, pointing a .44 Magnum in a bank robber’s face. “Is it empty or not?” The robber surrenders and then asks, “I gots to know!” Dirty Harry holds the gun to his head and squeezes the trigger…click! It was empty. Oh so cruel, so unfair, such a Dirty Harry! Yes, and the audience loved it because they knew this is how to defeat a Punk.

Relationships are inherently irrational because emotions are involved. Punks and Sissies always cry for “fairness”, while Bullies and Tramps play quite unfairly. Their lawlessness runs circles around fair play.

Love itself is irrational and mandates a change in Infantile assumptions. Infantiles are by nature filled with childish, rule-driven expectations which guarantee their failure. Lawless Infantiles like Bullies also live by demanding rules, but those of their own lawless making, and seem successful for a short while until they’ve destroyed so many people, they end up alone and empty.

Truthfully, Tribal kids don’t understand love. Their Tribal rules and expectations pervert love into a rational exchange of favors. This is not love. Love will not be bound by such rules.

Diffuse Infantiles are even more ill-equipped to build lasting love relationships because they become takers and not builders—certainly not givers. They become perpetually dependent on others to provide the love they need to survive.

Real Power

Jesus Christ taught a different path to victory: through Victorious Love Output. This is what “act like men!” is all about.

God’s love is also irrational and therefore penetrates the heart. Forgiveness is irrational. Sacrificial love is irrational. But God’s love is not lawless love, and this is a key distinction from how Infantiles love.

Corrie Ten Boom tells how she learned this late in her life. While teaching at a Dutch church, an old Nazi guard came forward in tears and repentance. She recognized him as a guard at her camp. She struggled with forgiveness and wanted to tell him she saw the atrocities he performed and remind him how detestable he was, but the Lord convicted her to forgive instead. She led the old Nazi to Christ that night, and God’s love was victorious against the brutality of the most brutal kind of Bully.

Victorious Love Output is not merely being nice, and it doesn’t stop with forgiveness. It moves outwards and towards enemies. It is determined to conquer through love.

Two Real Hopes

Despite the gloomy outlook for Infantiles, there remains great hope. There are, in fact, two paths to emotional maturity found in the Bible, and they correspond to these Tribal and Diffuse Love Spheres.

Tribal Hope

As mentioned already, the biggest problem in the Tribal Love Sphere is how far it strays away from God’s Love Sphere. God’s Love Sphere looks like this:

For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him will not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16

Jesus Christ brought us into God’s Love Sphere when we received the gift of Redemption, and by his precious blood he purchased whatever was redeemable from our damaged, illegitimate Tribal Love Sphere:

God, for whom and through whom everything was made, chose to bring many children into glory. …So now Jesus and the ones he makes holy have the same Father. That is why Jesus is not ashamed to call them his brothers and sisters. For he said to God, “I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters. I will praise you among your assembled people.” He also said, “I will put my trust in him,” that is, “I and the children God has given me.” Hebrews 2:10-13 (NLT)

It means that Punks and Sissies can be released from the chains of their unloving Tribal Love Sphere. “Unloving” is an accurate term–however painful it seems–to describe the Tribal Home. Inside that world we were taught to be fair-minded with others, to exchange this-for-that, and to “love your neighbor as yourself,” meaning “be fair to people!” Nobody denies the value of all these lessons. But taken together, they fall far short of what actually makes love work in the real world. This is why Jesus says:

He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. Matthew 10:37 (NASB)

Hope begins with understanding the need to leave behind that defective view of love which makes the Tribal Love Sphere work

The Power of Faith and Hope

What the Tribal Love Sphere lacks by definition is the ability to extend real faith and hope into the outside world. Faith and hope are the foundation for authentic love.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:13 (NLT)

And:

What is important is faith expressing itself in love. Galatians 5:6 (NLT)

Faith and hope in a Tribal Home is trapped within the confines of the trustworthy Tribe. Yet even the Tribe’s trustworthiness is not truly based in faith or hope, but in conformity and human control. Tribal members are trustworthy only if they conform, not if they forsake or betray the sacred Tribal trust.

God’s Love Sphere reaches to all the peoples from all Tribes and ethnic backgrounds, and Jesus Christ has brought his adopted brothers and sisters into this new “Tribe” — really, it’s the Tribe of the Human Race, as he says:

Jesus came and told his disciples, “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Matthew 28:18-19 (NLT)

Two characteristics mark God’s Love Sphere:

• “All the nations,” or “ethnoi” in the Greek, meaning what? “Tribes!” That’s right: all Tribes! What a threatening concept it is for Punks and Sissies! They were completely unprepared for this by their Tribal Homes. And this would be justifiably threatening, except for the next characteristic…
• “All authority has been given to me,” Jesus says. This means he is fundamentally operating from a position of great authority and victory, not fear and a great potential for defeat as with Tribal Love.

But how does this transition from a Tribal to God’s Love Sphere take place?

From Punk to Viceroy

Israel’s son Joseph is the story of one such transition, and in some regards Joseph’s transition is a dreadful picture. But from God’s view, and truthfully from an historical and objective viewpoint, Joseph was yanked from the ash-heap of destruction so typical in Tribal Love. While his brothers grew more cruel and depraved through Tribal intrigue, inbreeding and cavorting with depraved Canaanite women, Joseph’s world view was exalted and expanded beyond Canaan’s borders, and he became the most powerful man in the civilized world, excluding the Pharaoh.

Joseph was truly a Punk if ever there was one: bragging about his dreams, alienating his brothers and even his father, he was astonishingly naive. He waltzed out to meet his brothers alone, in his multi-colored coat which he knew would inflame their jealousies. He thought he moved with impunity wherever he went–even outside the protection of his father. When they sold him into slavery he discovered how vulnerable a Punk truly is!

But Joseph rose above his Tribal roots through a process of great breaking and disillusionment–not untypical of what all Tribal Infantiles first encounter in the “unfair world out there.” Time after time Joseph learned how terribly unfair the world is, as he went from captivity in slavery to unjust imprisonment and then betrayal by trusted friends (the Pharaoh’s baker and wine-taster). Everywhere he encountered the truth about depraved humanity.

At the same time Joseph somehow did not slide into further depravity like so many other Punks. He could have and should have become a Bully himself, considering how many Bullies (his depraved brothers) and Tramps (like Potiphar’s wife) he met. His faith and hope in Yahweh gave him the authority to move with confidence and victory in the most dire circumstances–is anything more depressing than an ancient Egyptian jail? Yet even in jail he rose to great heights as the warden’s right-hand man. An Infantile would first demand to be released!

Joseph emerged from all this with the character typical of someone whose faith and hope is rooted in God’s Love Sphere:

“God has made me forget all my trouble and all my father’s household,” [and] “God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction.” Genesis 41:51-52 (NASB)

No, Joseph did not actually abandon his family. As we know, he was able to return and save his family. But he was truly saved from the shadow of that illegitimate Tribal Love Sphere he grew up with, and he could move forward in life as a Viceroy. This is God’s will behind Redemption, and the reason why He adopted us into His family.

Diffuse Hope

God’s Love Sphere can capture and heal even the depraved Bullies and Tramps lost in a world of Diffuse Love. Jesus explained it well:

And Jesus answered him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he replied , “Say it, Teacher.”

“A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. “When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So which of them will love him more?” Simon answered and said, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.” And He said to him, “You have judged correctly.” Luke 7:41-43 (NASB)

In many respects, it is easier for the Bullies and Tramps of the world to enter God’s Love Sphere than it is for Punks and Sissies. Diffuse Love is so degrading and without structure, there is no structure holding them back. These are people far-removed from the Permanent Love Values of a Tribal Home. They’ve already forgotten “all my father’s household,” as it took Joseph so long to achieve. They do not “love father or mother more” than Jesus, and so have little allegiances standing in the way, unlike those closer to their Tribal roots.

Still, there must be enough value or substance in their depraved (empty) humanity for Christ to redeem. It is entirely possible to cross a threshold of depravity in which there is nothing redeemable in this person, and in fact they are little more than ravenous beasts, hardly human. Undoubtedly Adolf Hitler fits such a description of depravity, but exactly who does and where that line is crossed requires God’s ability to see deep inside a person’s heart, where the depravity is eating away.

These people can “love much” only if they’ve been “forgiven much,” which means they must receive forgiveness. As long as Bullies and Tramps hold onto their unquenchable thirst for Present Love Feelings, they remain beyond the reach of God’s Love Sphere.

The Need for Permanent Love

God’s Love Sphere is firmly based in Permanent Love Values, and from that foundation flows the badly-needed Present Love Feelings. This means the Diffuse Infantile must be willing to undertake a fundamental redefinition of love feelings.

Permanent Love Values also generate love feelings, but much differently than Present Love Feelings. PLV feelings are not as electric, but they have an enduring quality missing in PLF’s. Forgiveness is a PLV which produces feelings of acceptance and joy, but not the intense acceptance and joy one might experience with sex, for example.

In fact, Diffuse Infantiles find it very difficult to appreciate the more mellow-but-substantial feelings generated by PLV’s. These are new feelings, and they feel strange. Diffuse Infantiles quickly begin to feel restless because they miss the electric jolt of Present Love Feelings, not realizing they are actually experiencing a new set of feelings which will become, in time, a strong foundation for Victorious Love.

PLV’s build deep-seated significance which does not disappear easily. This is the greatest paradigm shift for the Diffuse Infantile, whose sense of significance is so intimately tied to the immediate experience of strong love feelings. The Diffuse Infantile must take the long-distance view of love feelings and love relationships in order to appreciate these PLV feelings.

Although Diffuse Infantiles are far more ready to enter God’s Love Sphere than Tribal Infantiles, they are also far less capable of making life work inside God’s Love Sphere. Tribal Infantiles have some of the basic structures of Present Love Feelings in-place, and they appreciate the feelings generated by PLV’s. For Diffuse Infantiles, their addictions and fundamental assumptions about the primacy of Present Love Feelings keep clouding their appreciation for God’s Love.

The process of Redemption changes life for the Diffuse Infantile. But that process will have to wait for another day.

Related posts:

1. Reality Parenting
2. Raising Infantiles