Rats, I Hate Rats!

Rats, I Hate Rats

Have you ever heard the sing-song round entitled Rats?  It is a highly entertaining song for children and a highly annoying occurrence for adults.  If you haven’t heard it, it goes something like this;

          

  Crazy?

            I was crazy once!

            They put me in a room, a round room with rats!

            Rats?! I hate rats!

            They make me crazy!!!

(Repeated until you have lost your voice or an adult loses their temper.)

Try it.  It is fun.  AND it pertains to our topic today!

Goddard quotes C.S. Lewis in his seventh chapter of Drawing Heaven Into a Marriage when he discusses charity*.  Lewis says, “If there are rats in the cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly.  But the suddenness does not create the rats, it only prevents them from hiding.”  He goes on to talk about how this is relevant to charity in our own lives.  If we struggle with charity at times when we are surprised or upset, it means that we lack some form of charity.  The short temper and angry answer doesn’t come from a sudden occurrence.  It comes from the lack of charity in ourselves.

Elder Max Caldwell gave us some advice about charity.  He said that charity, or the pure love of Christ, had three dimensions. 

Love for Christ, Love from Christ, and Love like Christ.

For: We must have a special place in our heart for our love of Christ. This love is such a deep feeling that we cannot understanding it all at once.  The same principle goes with all the ways that we have and show our love to Christ.  It is not easily understood.  We need to realize what he has done for us and do more than appreciate his sacrifice.  We have to love him and appreciate his sacrifice so much that we do everything in order to become like him. We love him because he first loved us.

**

From: This love is special.  This love is the perfect love that we must try to understand.  This is what sent Christ to sacrifice for us.  There was never a stronger love or more important task that had to be completed.  If we understand His love for us, we will have a stronger desire to love others.  Therefore love from Christ and love for Christ are building blocks.  They work together for us so that we can become a better person.

Like: We use this after we have built our foundation of love.  This is also a building block because it gives us an increase in the first two forms of love. But in my opinion, it is a secondary building block.  It cannot make a stable foundation.  We cannot love like Christ if we don’t understand how he loves us. 

All this talk about love is making me happy.  I think about all those I love in my life.  My fiancé, my parents, my siblings.  There is nothing that I would do to hurt them.  I always try and lift them up and help them succeed.  Imagine how much more our Savior loves us.  I know that if we all try to increase our Christ like love by even just a fraction, the world will be a better place.  We can get rid of the rats in our minds and hearts only through Jesus Christ and his Atonement.

And I really don’t like rats. :)

Resources:

*Goddard, H. W. (2007). Drawing heaven into your marriage: Powerful principles with eternal results. Fairfax, VA: Meridian Pub.

**http://www.meetmormonmissionaries.org/2613/future-mormon-missionary-contemplates-love-charity