Shakespeare’s Othello bellows:
“I have loved not wisely but too well.”
What he means is that his passions consumed him, and now he had destroyed what he loved. If you know the story, you will remember he had strangled his wife out of the mistaken fear that she had not been faithful to him.
Similarly, in his monumental book, Life Together, Dietrich Bohoeffer warns:
“The people most in love with community are in danger of destroying community.”
In other words, there are people who have made such an ideal of “Christian Community” that they are easily dissatisfied with the real thing. In their dissatisfaction they grumble, causing others to become disaffected, which further fuels their sense that this real Christian community does not meet the measure of idealized Christian community. In many cases such people eventually withdraw themselves from fellowship with the visible Church. In the end they devoid themselves of what they say they most wanted. And in their wake they leave behind others with feelings of abandonment, rejection, confusion, anger, and more inclination toward disengagement. These are the effects of their having loved “not wisely but too well”. Like Othello they kill what they claim they love.
I know people like this…
It is easy to love people hypothetically, or to love hypothetical people. It is quite another thing to love real flesh and blood. Real people are flawed. The better we get to know others the more apparent those flaws can become. That’s why the old adage is true: Familiarity does breed contempt. But more important, what Peter tells us is also true:
Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4.8)
As I think about the communities of which I am part my hope is simply that, rather than idealizing Christian community, we continually recommit ourselves to enact and embody John’s encouragement:
Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. (1 John 3.18)
Such love is founded upon the gospel. It is rooted in the shared experience of grace through common faith in the atoning work of Christ. It realizes that we will let each other down. It seeks reconciliation of wrongs and grievance. It models the laying down of our lives, and our preferences, for the joy of seeing others prosper and the oneness Jesus prays for us to be realized.
GRACE & PEACE 
It is not possible to lose what God causes you to experience with Agape love. When you are surrounded by what God causes you to experience with love you are understanding God’s wisdom and that is the only way to participate with God at unity with what is always happening.
There is not a way to be in love, you can only understand to look at love that exists as eternal continuable life at activity and with this know about your interests completely.
There is nothing human beings can destroy that God is not relaxing/collapsing because it is not being understood related to God as God always knows activity.
Withdrawal from the church is happening according to non continuable points of activity occurring there and continuable activity done at the church is still occurring with life going over to them in a way that will never end. Some understanding life at churches are not participating at continuable places of activity within what is God’s causation of appreciated emotional experiences. It is as if they step right past what is good and appreciated. Life that loves what God has caused to be understood as a church understanding area can understand to unite with an existence that is understanding God continuously using itself interested in what God is doing with everyone and everything.. With this, they will be participating with life in the church doing and saying what is able to be said within the causation of the experience of love. What is being understood within this communication as a visible church is the doing something different church where life is understanding out of unity.
Life that God causes you to experience with love are real, they are not flawed and they are understanding God as always. To get to know someone is to know them as God knows them and this never includes nervous system communication about flaws. There is nothing God is causing to be done in activity or communication that is flawed, however, there is life misunderstanding what God provides.
The life that is love is also the life that is caused to use itself doing something different when God is causing God to see a next interest. It can not be understood correctly to say that love covers sin, but it can be understood to say that the life of love is also the life of sin when spun down and this occurs when God is causing something else to be understood completely by moving in life that will understand an activity place to completion. God understands to God that a new interest (the placement of the next set of circumstances) is necessary when there is nothing else a doing something different area can be caused over to that is continuable.
There is not a way to love with actions and truth and not to be saying something that is united with that. If you are caused to exist as love, you are doing and saying what is love and truth. This is God’s causation of the continuous area of the Holy Spirit. All good people can thank God for the causation of speech that is saying what is interesting to God not that does not receive disconnects or breaks into pieces that are unacceptable experiences with hatred causing understanding life to unite with where they can understand continuously.
There is nothing Jesus can tell himself and he is not praying which would require him to receive integrations with nervous system information. Life understanding integrations with nervous system information or thought, of which prayer is one type, can not understand God without being in the area of separation. Jesus understands God directly through awareness of what he is caused to do and say now. Jesus is also caused to go around in a different way, non aware unless caused interested, as areas of pressurizing activity and as do something different thought integrations placed to life that is understanding in the area of separation.
There is an area that understands the communication of your prayers or your nervous system information and returns a communication to an area of your to be a whole existence where it can be understood and used. This area is able to be called the area of Mary within the understanding of Jesus’ United Existence having sights and vocabulary that they appreciate God providing. This area is comprised of understanding life and God has referred to this area as a human universal connector. When the communication that is coming up from this area is unacceptable, God is causing an area of life to separations and repositionings to what they can always do.
Good post Dennis. Lots of wisdom in those words…