Open Rebuke or Concealed Love?

Consider this passage: "Better is open rebuke than concealed love."

Which is worse: to be openly, rebuked by your spouse, or to have his/her love concealed from you?

Seems like the worse thing would be to be put down, corrected, interrupted, or reprimanded by your spouse in public. Isn't that the absolute worst? Don't we all hate that and draw a line there? If you are at a party or somewhere, and you are in the middle of a conversation with someone, only to have your husband/wife walk up and demand, something like, "You shouldn't let the kids run around!" Or like, "Do you always have to take so long, we want to go!"

Women somehow learn to let stuff like that roll off their backs. They sometimes and somehow learn to keep their mouths shut and just keep smiling. Have you ever noticed that? But believe me, they save it inside.

Men on the other hand never let stuff like that go. If a wife walks up to her husband in a public place and says, "Could you hurry it up? A lot of people are waiting!" she is destined to be in an out-n-out battle that night, and in his proverbial d-o-g house for a long time. Men don't do well with public humiliation, at all.

Well, just for a second, if you could, pretend that this passage is a truth in the human body and mind. That it's just true for humans. That the God of the universe - -the one who designed us- knows that even thought it may feel counter-intuitive, this is a truth.

What about that 'concealed love' part? God puts concealed love and open rebuke on the same axis. Why?

Concealed love is when you love someone, and don't tell them. Don't show them. Don't express it. What is the result of someone not receiving the benefit of being openly loved? They might begin to feel un-loved, right? UN as in reversed, as in love is actively taken away, as in things are done that demonstrate the removal of love. Un-done: A state at which something was once done and is now un-done, dismantled.

The act of concealing love is the same as dismantling that love. And thus, dismantling the relationship.

From His perspective, worse than the viciousness of rebuking the one you love in public and therefore looking like a jerk/bitch; worse than that gut-wrenching, sick, nauseous feeling...that humiliating, isolating, sickening feeling of being openly rebuked by your spouse; worse than those feelings are the feelings that result from concealed love.

The feelings that result from concealed love are feelings of being un-loved. And being a wife un-loved is one of 4 universal things that will eventually destroy our world....(another truth to consider):

"Under 3 things the earth trembles, under 4 it cannot bearup: a servant who becomes king, a fool who is full of food, an unloved woman who is married, and a maidservant who displaces her mistress."

Right now let's just consider the 'unloved woman who is married part'. Under 3 things it trembles, and 4 it collapses?? It's a slow decay universal to all cultures, countries, continents and conditions. And it will destroy the relationship of marriage around the world...and your marriage, too. Just how long can something tremble before it starts to crumble?

They are both losing situations: open rebuke, concealed love. Maybe the opposite of each could solve them both: open praise might lead to expressed love and expressed love might lead to open praise...which would lead to feelings of growing love, rather than dismantling love.

Wow. Who'd a thought?

So if you are in a relationship with anyone that is based in love: wife, husband, son, daughter, friend, mother, father, whatever: GO TELL THEM YOU LOVE THEM. GIVE THEM A HUG. YES, EVEN IF IT IS IN FRONT OF OTHERS. By employing its counterpart's opposite, you might invoke the end of open rebuke.

And therefore save the world!