Are you a good person?

One interesting thing about that question: most people won’t say either yes or no. Ask most people if they’re a good person (quite a way to begin a conversation, isn’t it?), and they’ll say something like, “I try to be.” Or “I hope so.” Or “Some good and some bad.” Unless maybe you ask someone who is either very arrogant or very depressed, almost no one feels sure of the answer. I’ll go out on a limb here, just reading that question at the start of the post evoked a visceral reaction of some kind, didn’t it? A little thrill of startled uncertainty? This, after all, is a question that dominates our self-image. Perhaps more than any other, it determines your own sense of who you are.

It's the wrong question.

I learned that only after my own life nearly fell apart. I realized that living your life by it—as nearly everyone does—is a recipe for disaster that explains nearly everything wrong with the world at large. Today, I’m going to explain why this is the case, and give you what I believe is the right question.

Am I A Bad Person?

I believed I was a bad person for most of my early life. I probably wouldn’t have said that if you asked me, but I believed it deep down. Like most people, my view of good or bad was based on a system of justice. Picture one of those kindergarten boards for tracking behavior. When you do something good, you get a check mark or a star or a smiley face, when you do something bad you get an X mark or a frowny face. At the most basic level, I believed that good or bad was a matter of ratios. For me, I’d say if I had about 90 percent good to 10 percent bad, that makes me a good person.

The problem, of course, was that I didn’t have that. I wasn’t a bad kid, really. I mean, I liked people and I didn’t mistreat them in any big way, I’d go so far as to call myself loving. I did have a way of getting into trouble (ask me to tell you sometime about the time I accidentally set fire to a highway). None of it was malicious, but it also wasn’t good enough. I just never seemed to have things together like other people did—certainly not like my brothers. That feeling stayed with me well into adulthood, and eventually it came pretty close to ruining my life.

But I discovered something amazing: not only did other people have this same problem that I did, but no matter how good they were, no matter what their ratio of good-to-bad might be, they almost always seemed to place that required threshold just out of reach.

Take my wife, Hope, for example. See, she actually does have that 90 percent ratio. In fact, she’s probably upwards of 95… and yet she had the same issue I did of thinking she was a bad person. In fact, she had it worse than I did! That doesn’t make much sense at all. At the very least, she should have felt better about herself than I did, right? And yet she could be really ruthless to herself, despite being the best woman I knew—because she demanded perfection of herself.

Obviously, this is a terrible way of doing things, I don’t expect any of you reading this will seriously disagree. But now a difficult question: what’s the alternative? After all, most people would agree that you need to hit some kind of threshold of decency to be considered a good person, to be worthy of forgiveness and acceptance. But everyone has their own ideas of what’s important and what goodness looks like. How do you draw that line? And if you can’t draw it, how can you ever really know where you are?

Simply put, we need to forget about the line.

How the heck does that even work?

Unconditional Love: Is It Practical?

The phrase “unconditional love” is a big one now, beloved by singers, Christians, and certain weird new-agey types like me (I’m not actually new age, but I work in a field dominated by them and use some of the same lingo, so I’m often stuck with the image). Still others say that there is no such thing, that all love is conditional, and this isn’t a bad thing, it’s just the nature of human relationships. Really unconditional love would be too easily abused, they might say, and it's easy to think of examples. One can imagine a woman with an abusive husband, who sticks it out and endures it all for the sake of the “love” they share. Detractors might say that if you commit to love and support a person no matter what, then you have no power in that relationship.

I’m going to circle back to answer this more fully in a moment, but for now let me just say that this comes from a misunderstanding of what I mean by unconditional love, and I would side with the rest of the world in telling that woman to get out of there!

When I got married, I didn’t really know what love was. What I had for my wife was NOT unconditional love, but what I’ve come to call “Love A.” I call it that because it’s what most people have for each other. It’s the default. I don’t mean to minimize the feelings that others have for each other. I don’t mean that it’s not real in that sense. But “unconditional” is a statement about commitment, not intensity, and I know better than most that people are rarely that committed.

Most people practice (as I did) what you might call “business-deal love.” I’ll do this if you do that, I won’t do this if you don’t do that. It’s much like a contract, whether spoken or unspoken. In a sense, they are relationships built on expectations—which you may remember from Dr. Dan Gilbert’s research on the campus of Harvard University are a “happiness killer.”

Thought of like this, it’s no wonder that marriages so often fail. Taken in the context of a business deal, it would not even be a failure so much as the inevitable result of the deal having run its course. It is also, you may notice, founded on the same basic principles as the system of Love A which we have for ourselves. We have a ratio and a scoring system in mind for the relationship, and we use this to judge it either “good” or “bad.” If a relationship crosses over to “bad” and stays there long enough, most people will start looking for the door. Because the alternative is misery, right?

Not quite. The alternative is misery… if you stay within the paradigm of Love A, of judgement and getting what you deserve. But there is such a thing as Love B. Let’s talk about what that looks like.

What Does Unconditional Love Really Look Like?

Let’s check back in on our example woman with the abusive husband. Does unconditional love really work in this circumstance?

Yes. But it doesn’t mean she should stick around.

When we say “unconditional love,” what does that actually mean? To me, it means the golden rule given by Jesus: “Love others as you love yourself.” Well then, let’s ask the question: how do we love ourselves? Do I always approve of everything I do? Definitely not, so apparently I can disapprove of someone’s actions while still loving them.  Do I always feel positive emotions toward myself? No, so apparently it is okay for my internal emotions towards those I love to change. Do I always trust myself to do the right thing? Haha! Less and less as I get older. No, it’s much better to be alert to your weaknesses, and to those of others, apparently.

Do I still forgive myself, and want the best for myself, no matter how many times I go wrong? YES, with a little help from God, I do. So here we’ve found something important. As I said before, I’d be first in line to tell any abuse victim to get out of there. Not only for all the obvious reasons, but because abuse hurts the abuser as well as the victim in the long-term, and preventing further harm is really the most loving thing for both of them.

But—and this is a hard thing to hear—I would tell that woman to try to forgive, and to wish the best for her husband, even if the best thing is never for them to be together again. I would not ask this of her right away. Forgiveness can take time, for the self as well as for others. But unforgiveness is one of the single biggest stressors in the world today. I’ve never worked with anyone who didn’t have some kind of unforgiveness issue. In the long run, holding onto even a very well justified grudge is only inflicting further harm on yourself.

Now, I won’t mince words: taking the plunge into love B is a scary thing. I do not believe you’re really making yourself more vulnerable, not in the long run. But you are giving up some control (as you would with any serious commitment). But putting aside those expectations and ratios and all of the things that impose limits on our ability to love each other has been the biggest game-changer of my life—and I’ve had a lot of them. Not only for what it does to my relationships with others, but what it does for my relationship with myself. I’ll end with a quote from C.S. Lewis today: “When you have learned to love others as you love yourself, then you will be permitted to love yourself as you love others.”

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd