Garments of Praise

When you show contempt against another person, you are revealing your own heart, because you are actually showing contempt towards God. His image bears on that person. James 3:9-10

My eyes burning and aching from the lack of sleep the night before, I leered through my heavy eyelids as the good ol' doc (counselor) gently reminded me of the command for me to respect my husband. Thinking myself clever, I retorted:
"I can't make myself respect him if I don't feel respect for him."                                                         
As any wise counselor would do, the good ol' doc responded, his words carefully selected and his tone of voice expressing humility and compassion:
"respect is a choice one makes and feelings will follow."      
The oppositional person that I am, I thought to myself just exactly how I would not force myself to ask God to help me respect that man. Then, as the bitterness and contempt began to bubble over, there was a very familiar nudge at my heart.                                    

"I do not want you to merely talk respectfully. I do not want you to merely behave respectfully. I want you to respect him."

"But he doesn't deserve respect!" I appealed, this conflict of wills battling it out inside of me as I sat in that office in a silence that seemed to magnify the already palpable tension.                                                              

"With the tongue you praise your Lord and Father, and with it you curse men, who have been made in My likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My Desley, this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? My Desley, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water. 

If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. 

Desley, are you playing the hypocrite? You tirelessly hassle your brothers and sisters to truly regard unborn babies - who they cannot see - as equal in dignity by virtue of Who is forming them in the womb and in Whose image they are created; but yet you deny your brother - even your husband - that same dignity, dismissing that I too have formed him in the womb and that He is my image bearer as well. Will you deem him unworthy of this right on the basis of something else entirely irrelevant? How are you any better than those who disregard the inherent dignity of one group of human beings on the basis of their size or age or mental capacities? You disregard the inherent dignity of your husband, who you have seen, on the basis of his behaviour."

As Dr.Laura Schlessinger consistently asserts, respecting any person is a choice (our feelings often do follow our actions,) but I would also add that respect is the heart's response when that heart is seeing God rightly and knitted together with His. If I don't respect my husband, evidently I am not holding God in as high regard as I would like to think I am.