Love
Have you ever been in love and couldn’t do a darn thing about it? Well, come to think of it, I guess that’s the only way it ever happens, isn’t it? You give that most sensitive part of yourself sheepishly to someone and hope that they don’t drop it in disgust, or worse, stomp on it mercilessly. Love’s a big chance.
I want people to love me. That would be just great, as a matter of fact. More to the point, on top of those people, it would really be keen (I was told by an older lady recently that, “That’s what the kids are saying these days.”) if I could find one person in particular who loved the living crap out of me. I mean, head over shitting heels in love with me. So, I try to figure out how to do that.
I theorize that every bit of baggage I carry, every bit of neurosis I act out, is because of love being misused in my life at some point. I don’t know: maybe it wasn’t returned, maybe it was lust, or maybe it was utterly missing in thousands of words, peppered here and there, throughout the last twenty-eight years. Whatever the case, just like anything truly good, love can be misused, and it has been in all of our lives and therefore causes us much emotional damage. And, I think, because of love being misused in our lives so often, we develop a faulty understanding of how love thrives.
I think Jesus might have been onto something with that whole “love others as yourself” thing. Maybe if we did more of that, people wouldn’t be so screwed up. We waste so much time trying to convince people that we are loveable that we don’t do any loving of our own. But, we can’t love when we have never experienced love, now can we? That’s where Jesus comes in. We love him because he first loved us. Not only that, he loved us when we were at our worst—“while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” So, I believe, it’s only when we recognize and experience God’s free love and acceptance will we be able to freely give our own love and acceptance to others.
The problem is that there isn’t some tidy methodology by which you can attain all the love you might want. So, after years of struggling to figure out how to force people to return my love, I realize that all I can do is give it. That’s all. The only thing I can control. And, in giving, I hope that someone else finds the end of themselves and are only left with this self-same truth—that all they can do is give—and that they, by God’s grace, cross my path and lavish that love on me.
All you can do is give it away and stand back. You can’t control people’s hearts and minds. That’s why we have cute little legal snafus like “Domestic Abuse” and its insidious cousin, Verbal—it’s all an attempt to control; manipulate. Because that’s the only thing love doesn’t hand over freely.
So, if you’re waiting for someone, like many of us are, don’t let that envelop your life. All that love you’re holding onto: give it all away, baby! Lavish it on everyone you come in contact with. That, guys and dolls, is the only thing you have any control over.
-Chad
4:26:43 PM 
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