The Dichotomy of Love

I am convinced that the beauty of love is in the dichotomy of selfishness and selflessness. Sometimes we get too caught up in the guilt that seeps into us when we are focusing on being selfless with our love. Guilt is a poison that attacks our ability to love fully which can be seen as an exchange - no, a mutually existing flow of giving and receiving. Love should flow in and out of our hearts to the people we are blessed to care for. Guilt makes our love one sided. We live in a world of commerce - we pay something and EXPECT something in return. We end up adopting this lens when we love. Sometimes we even find ourselves keeping tabs on who has loved us well so we can "return favors." Christianity teaches us to die to ourselves and give without expecting anything in return so when we are given a gift out of love, no matter the form: words of encouragement, money, acts of service, etc., we feel guilty because our selflessness makes us forget how to receive love.The guilt becomes a dam and we are left feeling empty. We feel empty because this dam makes us send acts of love out of guilt instead of the mutual gentle flow of receiving, giving, and accepting. What we may forget is that when the flow of love is not hindered by the dam of guilt, the people we love receive a gift of love as soon as we gratefully ACCEPT their love gift. That is what I mean by the mutual flow. Imagine love as a circular flow of water from one human being to another. Imagine the act of love is flowing from one person's heart to the other. Then the person sees that love gift and takes that flow into their own heart. As the heart is nourished and replenished by the love water flow, the gratefulness they experience flows back to the other persons heart replenishing them. Both hearts are then mutually loved, and replenished. The selfishness and selflessness happens at the same time when love is given, received, and appreciated. That is the beauty of the dichotomy of love. It is the most selfish and selfless act we can create. Let's love unhindered by the guilt dam and embrace the freedom we experience when we love this way.

Remembering our Freedom

Freedom. Freedom is something we seldom think about, and something we sometimes feel is as allusive as water running through our fingers when trying to grasp it. We distract ourselves so often with worries about our future and guilt about our past that we forget how much power we have inside of ourselves to change, to grow, and to fully exist. Madeline L’Engle described freedom as a Sonnet. God gave us the structure (what we commonly call “God’s Will”), but he left it up to us to fill in the words. We have the power to write our life verses, but so often we let others write it for us because of our insecurity. We let media, institutions, the government, and other people’s opinion of us, tell us what is right or wrong, what is good or bad, and we adjust accordingly. We do this so often that we throw ourselves into a cycle of what we assume are circumstances beyond our control. We are the authors of our story. The people who float into and out of our lives are our teachers, support systems, or challenges to make us stronger. They are not meant to be the authors of our stories, and only WE give them the power to write our stories for us. God lives inside of and outside of every one of us. God’s love is the source of the energy that is permanently available. It is found in every beautiful entity that God created, including YOU. Let’s tap into this energy and remind ourselves of the freedom it gives us, write our own stories, and encourage others to do the same.