Thinking About Love

So, got some ideas tossin' around this morning. Gotta write a bit down. Guess what really got the ol' noggin' churning was the minutes I spent staring at my son as I hoped he would fall back asleep after our first early morning feed. (don't you know the sacred Saturday rituals yet, o ye little one?). :)

Often in moments like those I just can't stop thinking about how much I LOVE this little human. Seriously, such deep love that I wanna cry.

But...I don't believe you merely birth a child to know what love is. That's one of those 'icing on the cake' deals. So is a really happy romantic love. Or being lucky enough to be born in a loving family. No, understanding love, true love, goes much deeper than that.

Have you ever had to work on loving someone that completely drives you crazy (ok, I suppose a mother understands that in the teen years, ha)? Have you ever found yourself staring down the barrel of a loaded gun--the one we often call 'sin'--because someone dear to you is making horrible choices? Have you ever had to try to continue to love your SELF because you were making horrible choices?

What about brotherly love to someone you have a hard time seeing as your 'brother' because society puts us all in pretty, little, labeled boxes.

What about a friend who is in the grips of depression/alcoholism/sickness/(insert more crap here). Tempting to kinda just slide out of the picture, huh? Yes, it is. Love is staying there. REALLY staying there, not just the lip service of it. That is so. frickin'. hard.

I saw a musical that is centered around the concept of love last night. I know, most any artform is centered around that theme. It's what inspires art, after all. The musical really made me reflect on my first teaching job in east OKC & the challenges of trying to love some of those kiddos that wanted to run as far away from love as humanly possible. (The school focused on teens that had already been to jail and/or juvy and they'd all been "labeled 'ED' "). Man, those kids wanted love SO much that they would use every fiber of their being to run away from it. And a few very special people there illustrated to me what love is. The challenging kind.

How can we experience the 'icing on the cake' moments--or, rather, appreciate them to the fullest--without first realizing how sacred & amazing love truly is? I don't know if we can. Hmmm, one of the questions of philosophy class 101 that always nagged me the most as a believer (in God) was trying to understand adversities of the world & why we must experience them. Why would a loving God allow certain things to go down. Devil or not. Perhaps this helps me make just a miniscule amount of sense with that.

(But I still don't know why innocent children fall victim to awful things. Help me on that one, God. I need your wisdom there because I get super pissed off. Thanks).

That is not to belittle the 'lovables' in our lives. We need lovable people to make us strong. We need optimism to fuel our fire to love the unlovables. At the end of the day, we are all so very, very lovable. Some people have just buried it a little deeper than others.

So, I give thanks to experiences

--within family, friends, on the job---

that teach me more about love. Isn't that why we are all here anyway?