Speaker: love is the most important skill

MOSES LAKE — Love is the most important skill you will learn life.

This is the message Houston Kraft, a professional speaker and “kindness advocate,” told a group of students at Big Bend Community College on Monday afternoon.

“You and Mother Teresa have a lot in common,” he said. “Was Mother Teresa born selfless? Did she go to selflessness college? No. She wanted to be selfless, and so she practiced.”

Love is choice, Kraft said, and the and the skills that come from choosing love — patience, kindness, forgiveness, respect, honesty, commitment, and humility — are “equally available to all of us” if we actively choose to love.

“Mother Teresa chose to love. She chose it every day,” Kraft said. “I use the skills of love more than any other set of skills I have ever learned.”

Kraft said that skills can be practiced, practice creates habits, and habits can shape our life.

“Things we do every day define who we are,” he said.

We find love difficult, Kraft said, because we don’t really understand it, and we are so profligate in the use of the word (to describe a fondness for ice cream or how we feel about the most important person in our lives) that we don’t really know how to practice.

For Kraft, the most important kind of love — what the Greeks called agape — is unconditional and selfless love as a choice, rather than a feeling, that loves even when it is inconvenient, difficult, and even unpleasant.

The only way to grow in love, to truly get good at it, is to love people we don’t like or understand and who suffer in ways that are different, Kraft said.

Such love gives us “an intentional imagination” and opens us to empathy and the suffering of others.

“Maybe we can sit down and talk and understand each other,” Kraft said.