ove is the supreme ethic, the divine purpose, the ultimate reason for existence. The only thing that ever changes about the concept of love is its expression. Some love out of an outpouring of compassion and gentle kindness. Others feel the need to express their feelings by withdrawing and letting the object of their affection learn things the best way they feel possible: the hard way. It can be difficult to understand tough love, but it can be just as dangerous to rely solely on soft love.

Tough love can be easiest to illustrate through the image of a father. A father who wants what’s best for his children will not always seem kind or gentle. Often he’ll give his son some general guidance and let him figure the rest out for himself. This is actually a valid form of teaching. It’s often much more effective to let people learn from their failures than to expect them to do things exactly as you instruct. This allows them to think independently and sometimes even come up with a better way of doing things than you had originally instructed.

The downside here is that sometimes this method can focus too heavily on the failure. Sharp discipline is nothing but fear mongering if you don’t follow it up by a healthy dose of gentle, friendly companionship.

Soft love is, of course, easiest to illustrate by a loving mother. Gentle, warm, kind, affectionate; these kinds of behaviors are involved in soft love. Soft love rewards right behavior, as opposed to tough love, which punishes wrong behavior. Everyone is familiar with this concept.

But soft love is not always the right kind of love to convey. Compassion in the face of dire moral failure can sometimes boost a man’s confidence and make him think he can get away with it again. Soft love is often displayed by push-over, permissive parents whose children become spoiled and unprepared for the world at large.

Each expression of love and teaching has merit and each of them has downfalls. God expressed both kinds of love throughout the Bible, but it is largely divided into tough love in the Old Testament, and soft love in the New. If the Church is to be Christlike, it must strike a balance and wisely decide which expression is appropriate for a particular circumstance. This decision may not always be obvious, but in the end … all we need is love.