Choosing Love

“God is LOVE.”

I John4:8

This has been a bad week.  Being in pain, listening to my grandson cough twenty out of twenty-four hours of the day, trying to get ahold of elusive doctors and missing normalcy all led to a plethora of feelings.

Feelings like despair, helplessness, frustration, anger, sadness and fear enveloped me like a second layer of skin this week.  I am so happy to be reminded that there are really only two authentic emotions in the world.  All feelings are secondary to either LOVE or FEAR.  This week was all about fear. 

Love is a difficult concept because so many times we plant our love seeds in fear soil.  The love I’m talking about is so much more than ego and needs.  I am talking about real authentic love with no agenda.  I’m speaking of the kind of love that we dive into without hesitation.  It is passionate and compassionate.  It looks like faith and it looks like God.  It acts like faith and it acts like God.  It is the place where judgment ceases to exist.  When we are lost in this kind of love, we see it in the face of every person, the petals of every flower.

Since we are all connected, refusing to love someone is like throwing rocks at the mirror.  We really are only hurling fear at ourselves.  The things we love in others are usually the things we love about ourselves and the things we fear in others are the things we fear about ourselves, although we rarely call it fear.  Our fear of others comes out as frustration, helplessness, dislike or hate.  When we realize that all those feelings come from fear, it can take us to a new perspective on the world.

Because of my keen sense of irony and observation, I can be the queen of commentary.  I can usually do this without any feelings attached to it, just enjoying the way life plays out.  I know that the commentary has gone off track when the fear settles in.  I have been off track this week with misdiagnosing doctors and the ones that don’t understand my sense of urgency.  So I must stop, take a deep breath, and step back into love.

There was a study done on rabbits at Harvard.  The rabbits were being fed high cholesterol food to study the effect on the heart.  Everything was turning out as expected except with one group of rabbits.  Heart disease was running rampant in the other rabbits, but it seemed this one group was like super bunnies.  The scientists doing this study were perplexed so they investigated.  When they looked closely at the situation, they realized that the caregivers of all the rabbits simply fed the rabbits and walked away, but the super bunny group had a person that happened to love rabbits.  As he fed them, he would stroke them and talk to them, even sing to them.  Because he loved them, the rabbits did not develop heart disease in spite of their horrible diet. 

What can love do for us?

“Love is a choice you make from moment to moment.” 
~ Barbara De Angelis