Love Actually

"What is this thing called love?"

This thing that songwriters...
novelists...
psychiatrists..
sociologists...
playwrights...
scriptwriters...
pastors..
priests...
children...
teens...
adults...
...are desperate to capture..experience..explain...

I remember reading 1 Corinthians 13 as a child and knowing that it was impossible.
It was to my mind the most impossible..improbable part of the bible...
More difficult than the Resurrection Story, the walking on water...or crossing of the Red Sea...

I remember praying to God as I walked in the woods around my family home in Nova Scotia...
As I wandered the dusty dirt roads to my great-grandmother's farm house...
As I canoed on the lake and skipped stones on the shore...
As I skated on black ice filled with air bubbles that looked like stars in the moonlight....

I remember asking God to show me what love was....it's true nature....I wanted to believe....

I remember crying out loud..
I remember saying to the not so silent woods:
"I want to know what love is...I want you to show me"
(I said this long before I knew they were lyrics to a song)

More than 3 decades later and I can say with certainty....
..that love is possible...
Not because I have perfected the art of loving...or been loved perfectly by those around me...
I know because ..
The love of my creator has never waned...
His attention and care has never faltered...
His purity of purpose has swallowed all my imperfections..
His availability has been constant.

I am realizing that love is incapable of being withheld.
It's very nature prohibits it.

Today I marvel at my heavenly father's answer to my prayer.
He has surrounded me with love and that love...
Flows freely and unhindered towards me and swirls in eddies around me...

The goal is to tilt back your head..
throw your arms wide open...
close your eyes and relish the fact that you do NOT decide who gets it and who doesn't.
Love is not dependent on the person who is being loved.
It lives and breathes to be...to do...
....to love...unhindered....without constraints...

It is....possessed by none..available to all...


Love has nothing in it that says:
" But they so I "....

God is light.
God is love.
Freely you have received..
Freely give.
Lavishly.
Unrestrainedly.
Uninhibitedly.
Undeservedly.

Take off the reins.
What you are holding on to...portioning out...rationing..

Is. not. love.

It is counterfeit.

Toss it.

You know the true thing.

It has no weight.
It is no burden.
Has no lack.
No end.

You have to believe in it...
It takes faith...
Because you can't give what you don't first receive...
You are beloved....B.E.L.O.V.E.D....
LOVED first. Then LOVE.
Relax....
Ir's a flow through....it flows through...
It's no pressure... stress free....
It's love...actually...