There’s a whole lot of garbage on Facebook, as you Facebook subscribers are well aware. But hidden among all those annoying notices that somebody has sent you a rutabaga and that somebody you barely know is listening to a Barenaked Ladies tune at this very minute, there is an occasional gem.

I found a gem on Saturday. It was a quote, in the form of a note. Here it is:

Now I’m not even going to hazard a guess as to the doctrinal soundness of this quote, but it certainly speaks to the human condition. We human beings spend a lot of time spinning our wheels, trying to love people unconditionally. What happens? Real life gets in the way — that’s what happens!

Here are just a few instances where we try to love as Jesus loves, only to find ourselves coming up short:

• We’re asked to love people who are as easy to love as sea urchins or cacti — all prickly and full of thorns. Quite often the reason they need us to love them is that they’ve pushed everyone else away.
• We’re asked to love at the most inconvenient times. It’s not just during our favorite television program (those can be recorded and watched later), but right before our hardest final exam or the day our big project is due at work or the afternoon before we’re putting on the Pursuit of Excellence program for the Young Women.
• We’re asked to go way, way out of our comfort zones. It’s easy to pop a casserole in the oven, but people usually don’t need the casserole. They need their laundry done or their floors mopped or their seventeen children babysat on the same day your entire extended family is flying in to celebrate Thanksgiving, or something else that is not even remotely what we had in mind when we decided to show them how much we care.
• We’re asked to love people without judging them or even (sometimes) without offering them advice, even though they’re wearing neon signs on their heads that say, “I’m messing up my whole life and I don’t know why.” (Boy, are those signs hard to ignore!)
• We’re asked to love the people we home teach, even when they won’t answer our phone calls or let us in the door.
• We’re asked to love total strangers who drop their problems at our feet and say, “Fix me.”
• We’re asked to love people we can’t trust — people who make promises they don’t keep, or who pilfer things from our homes when they don’t think we’re looking, or who make up the most creative little stories starring us (and who spread those stories to anyone who will listen).
• We’re asked to love people who refuse to help themselves — who think of themselves as victims and who expect everything to be handed to them just because they don’t want to pick themselves up and do their own work.
• We’re asked to love people who don’t look like we do, don’t talk like we do, don’t vote like we do, and don’t even pray to the same God we pray to.
• We’re asked to love people who have no intention of loving us in return, and who would even harm us if they only had a chance to do so.

The quote was right. We’re human. We can’t do all those things — not even close. But we can try. Even when we fail this time, there will be an opportunity tomorrow to love again. Maybe tomorrow we’ll be better, or maybe we won’t.

Eventually, as the quote says, we’ll be in a place where we can love unconditionally, perfectly. Until then, what matters is that we pick ourselves up and try again.