When the world needs love, love sweet love
The stage we’re at in humanity is worrisome. I hear hectic stories going around about the way we treat ourselves and each other. We don’t seem to know the first thing about love and instead of going to the only source who wouldn’t lie to us about it we settle for our own limited interpretations of what we suspect it could be.
It’s sad knowing that the distance between us and God isn’t because He doesn’t want anything to do with us but that we don’t want anything to do with Him. We’d rather judge Him based on whose He is (you know yourself if you say things like Mwari wekwapastor nhingi) at face value and without ever going deeper for ourselves we labour in vain to figure it out on our own understanding dodging Him like a bullet. It’s a hard truth but we “the world” seriously need real love.
Everyone falls in love sometimes
With the number of times that song has been remade there is no way it was going to escape my lightning fast mind as a heading. Aside from its entertaining qualities it’s also one of those annoying truths that you can’t hide from or deny. When you fall in love sometimes it brings out the best in you and other times it shows you why someone should have please called 911 (I think it’s about old school songs today LOL..).
Anyway the thing about falling in love sometimes is that if it doesn’t work out we can get so attached that we hold onto it long after the actual person is gone from our hearts. I don’t know if it’s a sense of unforgiveness with ourselves where we self flagellate and take responsibility for the whole thing like the other person had nothing to do with it or if it’s a counterproductive defence mechanism where trying to avoid getting hurt again keeps you in a repeating hurt cycle.
I like the way Anne Lamott phrases it in her book “Bird by Bird: some instructions on writing and life”. As she shares on perfectionism as a hindrance to writing she recounts a lesson she picked up from the nurse who refused to facilitate the renewal of her prescription of pain meds shortly after her tonsillectomy suggesting that she buy gum and chew it vigorously instead.
The nurse “…explained that when we have a wound in our body, the nearby muscles cramp around it to protect it from any more violation and from infection, and that I would need to use the muscles if I wanted them to relax again. So finally my best friend Pammy went out and bought me some gum, and I began to chew it, with great hostility and scepticism. The first bites caused a ripping sensation in the back of my throat, but within minutes all the pain was gone, permanently. I think that something happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds – the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both – to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal.”
It reminds me of one falling in love instance, where as he slammed my car door in my face I angrily drove off while it hit me that I had done it again, slipped and gone swimming in the mud wearing my favourite whites. You see, mud’s problem is that it likes things, it likes clinging onto clean clothes and mucking about under finger nails and other secret places just so that a while later it dustily flakes off from somewhere you didn’t expect and embarrasses you at the most inopportune time. These left over’s can really cloud your judgement and you can walk around claiming to be single when you are really just dating your past.
The past is a jealous ex
He/she can’t stand to see you walk out the door to a better day so they show up unannounced just to remind you that it apparently isn’t over. They wake you up at midnight and remind you of your unworthiness and how no one will ever love you and if you haven’t chewed the gum with great hostility and scepticism working through that excruciating pain of exercising your muscles again you may fall back into nursing a closed wound. You may miss the beauty of true love because you’re afraid to give your heart again.
As Valentine’s month approaches may God restore love in our hearts teaching us what it really is bird by bird (that last bit will make sense when you watch Anne’s Ted talk, link is below).
