Keeping the dream alive.

I've started reading this ebook since Monday..
and i must say that i've been mightly challenged by it.

One of the chapters speak about 'loving thy neighbour', something which i've trying really hard, and not succeeding.

excerpt:

They do believe in God; they do indeed trust Christ as their Saviour, but
the love they hoped to feel consistently eludes them. What is the trouble?

The problem is not a light one. A real difficulty is involved, one
which may be stated in the form of a question: How can I love by commandment? Of
all the emotions of which the soul is capable, love is by far the freest, the
most unreasoning, the one least likely to spring up at the call of duty or
obligation, and surely the one that will not come at the command of another. No
law has ever been passed that can compel one moral being to love another, for by
the very nature of it love must be voluntary. No one can be coerced or
frightened into loving anyone. Love just does not come that way. So what are we
to do with our Lord's command to love God and our neighbor?

To find our way out of the shadows and into the cheerful sunlight we
need only to know that there are two kinds of love: the love of feeling and the
love of willing. The one lies in the emotions, the other in the will. Over the
one we may have little control. It comes and goes, rises and falls, flares up
and disappears as it chooses, and changes from hot to warm to cool and back to
warm again very much as does the weather. Such love was not in the mind of
Christ when He told His people to love God and each other. As well command a
butterfly to light on our shoulder as to attempt to command this whimsical kind
of affection to visit our hearts.

The love the Bible enjoins is not the love of feeling; it is the love
of willing, the willed tendency of the heart. (For these two happy phrases I am
indebted to another, a master of the inner life whose pen was only a short time
ago stilled by death.)

and something that struck me hard today was this sentence..

Be hard on yourself and easy on others. Carry your own cross but never lay one on the back of another.

It's just so much easier to view yourself as the goody-two-shoes, with an explanation for every nonsense behaviour, while every wrong that another makes is being condemmed.
it's just much easier to criticise others.

me thinks i'm liking Tozer's writings.