Thoughts 8.4.21

To love is to risk.

To love is to risk. To orient ourselves in a way where we are willing and working towards extending love means we must be willing and working to inviting it. This concept of love. This infinite and cosmic mystery we have boiled down into four letters. It is the fabric of life, the warm breeze in a cool night, the glimmer of the stars in a dark sky. It is the force of a hurricane and the rumble of an earth quake. It’s is simultaneously fierce and calm. Nature in its ferocity and utter beauty is the only thing capable of comparing it to. If it were personified. She would be loyal and aggressive for those she is committed to. She would be tender and kind to those she has never seen. She would be the beginning smile and the ending embrace. She would stand and bow. How are we as these mortal and fragile beings even meant to begin to entertain this elemental and cosmic black hole that is love in our own lives. The writer Anne Lamott says this: “I know the secret to life: if you want loving feelings, do loving things.” I’m starting to learn the things God has commanded us to do are far less about pleasing him and far more about doing the things that will create in us a version of ourselves more like what the Maker had designed. People might disagree with me on this, that we are to live in a way that honors and pleases the Almighty. Yet, what I can see of the person of Jesus holding, within him the almighty God, is a warm welcome into a way of life ready to embrace these complex and life altering concepts into little actions. Smiling at strangers, letting the awkward conversation with an acquaintance last beyond the pleasantries, plucking up trash off the street someone else had left, calling your mom. These courageous moments are how we chip away at the infinite beauty of love. A life of love is hallmarked by millions of insignificant loving choices catalyzing ourselves a bit more into the version we were truly designed to be.