C.S. Lewis Sunday - Love is More than Kindness

Continuing on the theme of my Calvin and Hobbes cartoon yesterday (here), I am excited to share my #1 most favorite C.S. Lewis quote. I've always thought the prevalent idea of God's supposed "unconditional love" was flawed. This quote points out exactly what is wrong with the idea. God may love us no matter what, but His love is not always what people think of when they say "unconditional." God loves us, so sometimes he WANTS us to suffer so that we can learn. God's Love is more than kindness. 

"There is kindness in Love; but Love and kindness are NOT coterminous, and when kindness is separated from other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object—we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished (Hebrews 12:8). It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms; with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense." 

--C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain