love




Love can be a smothering blanket; a confining cage.
After years of it, you become like veal - older, but too tender to exert yourself in and upon the world.

Love can a be a warm rug tucked around you, then snatched a way.
Over and over.
Left on a cold floor, you will do anything to recover the warmth. 
Strangely, years of that never prepare you for the cold each time, but you learn quickly how to get that rug back.
And at any personal cost.

Love can be a word, thrown at you like a life preserver, but never until you get desperate enough to  beg.  Sometimes by then, it's too late.  It can feel like drowning in a desert.  If your mouth is full of sand by the time you ask, was that love that watched and waited?

What is love supposed to be?
Partners.
Team.
Family.
Kindness.
Encouragement.
Carrying loads together.
Side by side.
Setting loads down to rest together.
Side by side.
Celebration - "Look what you did!" or even better, just "See who you are!"
Privilege - to see a soul bare the way it shows itself to so few, but the way it is most itself.
Known.


Do we love because "He first loved us?"
It makes sense to me that someone created us, even if I can't prove it.
But we seem like art.  You do.
Maybe someone filled with Love imparted that love to us, and it's in our essence.  What a great fuss is made about sin being imparted to us as soon as we enter the world!  It's exhaustifying and defeating.  As if anyone was afraid they were perfect.  What about the love in our Artist's DNA?  More about that, please and thank you.


Love is our language and means, our need and our gift to give.
Otherwise, where do we get it?
I don't know.
But I can know.
And I can know...without a textbook, a tome, a preacher or a class.
If something is true, it's just true, is it not?
Whoever needed more than a soul to know love.