Chad Ford introduced me to the term ‘Dangerous Love’ that pushed me to see the love he describes as the love of God. Chad helps us see love as a willingness to be right in the relationship over being right in the facts. We can view love as a willingness to bring as many parties into the solution or plan as possible. Does the love that Chad describes help us understand God’s love? I believe God loves dangerously.

The LDSLiving magazine highlighted an ‘all in’ podcast that interviewed Chad Ford on his recent book, ’Dangerous Love.’ You can read the entire transcript or listen to Chad’s full interview. In addition, he has a podcast on his website. Here are a few snippets that caught my attention;

• Dangerous love should invite and bring as many people as possible into that solution to try to find a way forward.
• What’s eternal in our faith? It’s relationships.
• I can often get caught up in a principle, and I’m technically right, but be very wrong in my relationship towards another person. I can be right, but be wrong in being right.
• And so I think that one thing that can be really helpful, is it’s okay to have beliefs and to feel right about things. But my priority, my number one is, “Am I right with the person that I’m with?”
• And so to me, it’s always asking the question before I say or do anything else, “Am I right with this person? Do I love them? Do I care for them? Do I see them, deeply, right now? And do they know it? And have they felt it? Has it been shown in my words and my actions?”
• My advice to parents, my advice to leaders, is a really simple one. Make sure that of all the things that I’m right about that my biggest priority is that I’m right in my relationship with this person.

You can find the above snippets bolded in context below. God’s eternal plan is built on dangerous love. If we believe that premise, how might we answer the following questions?

• If God cares more about the relationship than being right, how far might he allow the relationship to distort understanding about the ‘right?’
• If God wants to bring as many people as possible into the solution, how much is the solution solely God’s creation?
• If the truth can arrive, naturally, through strong relationships, how long will God work on the relationship before holding the truth as a judgment?

What dangerous love is not

And I’m like, you know, first of all, from a faith perspective, love is the power that creates the universe, that is the catalyst of the Atonement, [and] that literally changes our world. But it’s not romantic love. It’s not the sort of love that we hear in rock songs, or, you know, in moves. And it’s not even the love that means ’like,’ in that I have to like you, or agree with you, or we have to be best friends, or we have to have everything in common with each other. It’s not like [the] love in ‘I love chocolate’ or ‘I love pizza,’ or ‘I love my roommate,’ or what have you.

What dangerous love is

It’s the love that says that your needs and wants and desires matter to me as much as my own - that I hold you sacred because you’re another human being, and because of that, I’m committed to a relationship that is both beneficial to you and to me, right? That I’m here to help you along your life’s journey, that we’re in this together … it should invite and bring as many people as possible into that solution to try to find a way forward. ‘Dangerous love’ is the sort of love that needs to exist and endure, even when the other person isn’t seeing me as a person - even when the other person isn’t turning first, even when we deeply disagree on things. That is the sort of love that endures.

It’s exactly what it sounds like. It choosing love over fear in the face conflict. It is choosing we over me. Fear is about self-preservation. Dangerous love is about us-preservation. Dangerous love transcends that fear. It transforms conflict by calling upon us to let go of self-concern: “What will happen to me if l let down my walls and help the person I’m in conflict with” and embrace us-concern: “What will happen to us if I don’t?” And while many people hear the word and think “soft” — it is anything but soft. There is nothing “safe” in dangerous love. Dangerous love requires more than courage, it demands fearlessness. It is scary. It takes risks. There will be casualties.¹

Dangerous love cares more about the relationship than the right

Yeah. Well, if you think about this, and I want to think about this, because of our audience - meaning uniquely LDS perspective - for a minute. What’s, what’s eternal in our faith? It’s relationships. One of the unique factors in our faith is this idea of being sealed and being sealed for eternity and the power of human relationships, and what it means, what it means to us. It’s something that I deeply love about our faith, and how we sort of think about our relationships, both before this world began, what they’re like here and what they’ll be on into the eternities. And that I can often get caught up in a, in a principle, and I’m technically right in, but be very wrong in my relationship towards another person. I can be right, but be wrong in being right.

And so I think that one, one thing that can be really helpful, is it’s okay to have beliefs and to feel right about things. But my priority, my number one is, “Am I right with the person that I’m with?” Because teaching and communicating or even correcting – which we have to do some times as parents, as bosses, you know, as leaders within organizations – there are times for those, but they always go better, they are always more powerful and influential when my relationship is right with the person.

When people know that I deeply care about them, that I’ve taken the time and effort to understand them. To listen and learn, to build relationships with them. In those moments where I have to offer teaching or correction or what have you, it lands differently than when my relationship is not right with them. And also, I’ll only choose to teach and communicate out of a sense of true care and compassion and love for the person, as opposed to condemnation or judgment, or any of the sort of other - other sort of motivations, which I might, I might want to engage in those sort of behaviors. And so to me, it’s always asking the question before I say or do anything else, “Am I right with this person? Do I love them? Do I care for them? Do I see them, deeply, right now? And do they know it? And have they felt it? Has it been shown in my words and my actions?”

And when I do that, then interestingly, many times the problem takes care of itself. Just on its own at that moment. But in those cases, when it doesn’t, then I actually think there’s space to be invitational to other people to be, be helpful through that. And so that, you know, my advice to parents, my advice to leaders, is a really simple one. Make sure that of all the things that I’m right about that my biggest priority is that I’m right in my relationship with this person. That I see them the way that their Heavenly Parents might see them, for example. That I see them the way – if I need to, the way their mother might see them or, you know, their biggest advocate or friend – and I see them that way first, and then let my actions be dictated from there.

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