How I love to hear my children say "I love you, Mom!" Children need to say I love you often, and they really feel the love they are giving and receiving. All of us, as babies, toddlers, and younger children loved without abandon, and as we got older, love started to be less of a feeling. Instead of love flowing from our hearts, it began to make a home in our heads, our minds, as a simple thought. In order for love to be effective in the world, it cannot be something that comes strictly in the form of a thought or an idea.
Love is preached about, sung about, and talked all the time in our churches, our Sunday School classes, our radios, our book stores, and we celebrate love on Valentine's day. Love is talked about all the time, but all you have to do is look around the world, and you can tell that love isn't felt by everyone. Thinking about love and actually letting yourself feel loved is two very different things. It is hard for children of military families whose schools are completely run down, and one step away from being condemned, to feel loved. It is hard for a shut-in to feel loved if no one stops to call and find out how she is doing. It is hard for the "working poor" to feel loved by their country when leaders put their political party ahead of the human face. Jesus invites us to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.
Notice that heart comes first. Love isn't genuine, or effective, if it isn't felt. I think of all the times that Charles and I have told each other "I love you", and we say it so often that I tend to forget to feel it. I think it is often hardest to love our own family members. We take them for granted, but I believe there is more to it than that. We forget how much we really do love them. I have to remind myself often to remember the moments when I really and truly felt love for them. I remember how I felt on my wedding day when Charles and I promised to live our life together, and to love each other for a lifetime. I can feel that love. I have to use my mind to make the connection between love in my thinking and love in my heart. Remembering becomes the bridge that connects mind to heart, and I must cross that bridge every day in order to make sure love is felt by the heart and love is made real. The more I am able to cross that bridge, the easier it will become to help others cross that bridge too.
Love is more than just a feeling. It is a force and a power that has the ability to change lives. It is the thing we think we know how to do, and yet, it is what we still don't fully understand or comprehend. Every thing we do is a choice that is made either from love or fear. I got up in the middle of the night to feed my newborn baby because I loved her. I support my husband in his ministry and what he feels called to do because I love him. I'll stay up baking cookies late at night for my son's preschool because I love him. I will volunteer at Sunday School because I love the faith I practice and I love living my faith out with a church family. I will drive 500 miles to see my father-in-law several times a year because I love him. I will write a thank you note to the person who bought me lunch because I love her friendship and I love being with her, and I appreciate the love she has shown me. When you stop to think about what, and who, you loved in one day, love is made very visible by our actions, but we often forget to stop and feel that love and notice what love does for us. What do we gain by feeling that love?
We gain happiness and gratitude. Love makes us happy. Love and happiness are completely intertwined, and because both are part of our true nature, you can't help but feel happy because you feel loved.
Think about falling in love with your spouse. You weren't just in love, you were happy. Didn't every day feel just wonderful? There are songs written about how much more beautiful every flower looks when you're in love, how much more blue the sky is when you have found that person who loves you. Nothing can go wrong when you first fell in love. That person whom you love and who loves you has also made you very happy. That kind of intense love takes on a different shape and form as time goes on. Love develops differently at different stages, but it is love that makes people happy. In the busy-ness of life, we don't really take the time to actually study the powerful effects of love on our day-to-day lives. When one of my children doesn't feel well, they don't just want the tylenol to make the fever go away. They want to be held and cuddled. They want their hair stroked. They want to be touched. The tylenol can make a fever go down, but it is the love of a mom that is just as powerful as that tylenol. Any doctor will tell you that a sick patient in the hospital will do much better if loved ones come to visit, if people send cards and flowers with notes attached, and little gifts to decorate their room. Science is now starting to measure the effects of prayer on the sick. They are finding that prayer makes a difference. What is prayer, but an act of love. It is also why a stay-at-home mom who has been with her little children all day, and has poured out every last drop of love to her kids, finds the dinner hour so hard. Many times her "love tank" is empty. She needs to be refilled with love to get through the dinner hour and bedtime. She has been helping, cooking, laundering, cleaning, shopping, chauffering, and breaking up fights all day. At the heart of all these actions, is love. It is love that is fueling every one of these actions, so when the end of the day comes, if she has had no time to love herself, or hasn't received the love she needs, a mom is spent, tired, frustrated, and even angry. She has been emptied of all love.
When you see, feel, and hear an angry person, they are simply not feeling loved. When someone "gets" angry, they simply have not felt valued, or that they matter. They didn't "get" the feeling of love they felt they deserved, and then they begin to react to fear. People not feeling loved get angry, and when they are feeling angry, it is because they are feeling fearful that they will not be loved. For example, I once encountered an elderly gentleman in a doctor's office. He happened to be in the billing department while I was paying a co-payment. He was furious because he kept getting billed $200.00 that he swore he already had paid. He, in a very loud voice, told the lady in the billing dept. he would never pay that bill. As I watched this interchange take place, it became obvious that he had a difficult time seeing and hearing. The lady in the billing department was trying to be patient and kind, and did her best to explain the problem. Beneath this elderly man's anger, you could sense fear. He feared he was being taken advantage of because of his sight and hearing. He feared he wasn't going to be able to afford future health care. And deep down, he probably fears a nursing home and becoming more dependent upon others in his daily life. At the heart of everyone, at any age, is the need to feel loved for who we are no matter what. When we feel that love being threatened, we become fearful, and that fear gets transformed into anger.
That is why Jesus, and so many other people after him, continued to deliver a message of loving others. If we could just learn how to help people, not just know they are loved, but to really feel that love, our world could change. At the very heart of the civil rights movement, was love. Not just that everyone is equal, but that everyone is loved and valued equally. Laws in our country had to change in order to help African Americans to feel loved and valued. It wasn't just about blacks and whites being able to use the same restrooms, go to the same schools, and be able to get good jobs, it was about a whole nation rising up and saying, we love you and value you so much that we will change how our country operates so that you have every opportunity to pursue the right to happiness you deserve.
We all know in our heads that everyone deserves to feel loved, but very few people really become students of how love operates, how love transforms, and what blocks love from flowing to us and out to everyone else. It is a divine power that we have all inherited because God made us out of love. God made us to be love. God made us to give and receive love. God loves the world through us. Divine love flows through us. Part of our purpose on this earth, is to unlearn fear and re-learn how to love. It is kind of like the stroke victim who has to re-learn how to walk again. We have to remember that our true nature is love, and we have to learn what love really feels like so that we can help others remember what love feels like. If everyone were only operating from love, and fear did not exist, can you imagine what kind of heaven we could have now? The happiest place on earth wouldn't be Disneyland, it would be inside us and all around us.
It is so vital that we study people who love well and who love freely and effectively. Study Mother Theresa. Study Martin Luther King. Study Ghandi. Study your next door neighbor. Study your parents. Study your pastor. Study your teachers. Study your best friends. Study yourself. Then do what they do, in the way that God is calling you to love. Go after knowledge of what love is and, and even more importantly, what it is not. Think about all the people you have met or learned about in books or television. Who are the people that you admire because of the way they made you, and others, feel? The people who uplift you and inspire you, are the people who made you feel loved to some degree. They help you remember that you belong to God, and your truest nature is love. They are the people who somehow were able to make you feel loved and important, no matter what you may have done. Why do you think people flocked to Jesus? Because he made them feel loved. He emphasized love, not the "sin". And Jesus could love the way he did because he felt loved by God. He felt loved by God. It wasn't just "head knowledge". Jesus had "heart knowledge".
When you feel loved, you feel happy. When you feel happy, you feel peaceful. When you feel peaceful, you feel joyful. If everyone on earth felt this way, it would be impossible for war, hunger, disease, crime, and fear to exist. Impossible. God wants that. God has designed the world to make you and everyone else to feel loved. But we have become so comfortable and dependent upon fear, that we must ask God to help us feel loved again. There are many people who walk around all day not feeling loved at all. They are so numbed by fear, that love begins to feel like a foreign object.
To love the Lord God, with all our heart and soul and mind, we must become aware of the feeling of love, and what motivates us to love others. We must become attentive to how people have loved us on any given day. We must pray to become sensitive to who loves us, why they love us, and how they love us. We must begin to train our minds to think thoughts of love, not fear. We must not let our minds dwell on anything that is the opposite of love. It is then that we can literally love more effectively. Love can become our tool for righting wrongs. The feelings of love are often heightened, and most intense, at weddings, the birth of a child, and the death of a loved one. Those are overwhelming feelings of love that we can feel everyday if we will open ourselves up to that possibility, the possibility of feeling extraordinary love in the ordinary events of our day.
It is not the thought of love that conquerors all, it is the ability to make people feel loved that conquerors all. It is the action born from the inspired thought that makes people feel loved. It was the feeling of love that caused a woman to anoint Jesus with the finest perfume. It was the feeling of love that moved Joseph to marry Mary. It was the feeling of love that caused a man to remove his sandals and feel the holy ground beneath him, while a bush burned. It was the feeling of love that drew a twelve year old boy to the temple to pray. Love built the celebration for the prodigal son when he came back to his father. Love calmed the winds, stilled the waters, and caused a man to move toward Jesus, hand out, and ready to feel even more love. Love placed a baby in a basket and set it upon the waters,and kept that baby safe for the rest of his life. Love changed water into wine and kept a wedding celebration going. Love stopped the crowds from stoning a woman to death. What has the feeling of love done for you? How has the feeling of love transformed you? My prayer for you and everyone is that you may genuinely feel the power of love in your life.
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