Love is Hard

Love is hard.

When you love something or someone, it's not easy. It is an on-going process that is both difficult and challenging. However, it can be very rewarding. Love travels miles for the ones that it cares about and does not regard airfare as a price too high to pay. Love is given, used, and recycled. Love takes many forms, at times familiar and at other times, unfamiliar. Love is trying. Love requires sacrifice, the kind a military serviceman or servicewoman gives his/her country when they are deployed. Love requires that you give of yourself without expecting anything in return.

Love also teaches you about yourself. Love is the mirror in which we look into everyday, judging our appearance from the outside, allowing the public to view us the way that we see ourselves. Though, in reality, the inside is what fly's away, revealing the cocoon we have tightly packed up inside us. Love prunes you and makes you stronger. Sometimes, love makes you weak and sorrowful, in order to help you understand an important lesson or to grow and/or maintain closeness to a group.

Love requires you to take risks, to try to surf that high wave rather than skimming in shallow water. Love asks you to see your neighbor as "greater than yourself" and to put their needs before your own. Love encourages you to support your neighbor and to care for them in tangible ways. Love requires you to listen, both thoughtfully and reflectively.

Though love requires all this and more, it is ultimately a teacher. Love requires you to be the child, to sit in the chair and to learn from example. Love requires that we take off our own size 6 shoes in order to walk in our neighbor's size 10. Only when we assume a position like this, can we truly understand what it is like to love one another deeply, in service, in gratitude, in humility, and with thanksgiving.

Cheers.