Here’s an excerpt from The Inner Voice of Love by one of my favorite authors and thinkers, Henri Nouwen.
“Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant. Every time you experience the pain of rejection, absence, or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide not to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.
The more you have loved and have allowed yourself to suffer because of your love, the more you will be able to let your heart grow wider and deeper. When your love is truly giving and receiving, those whom you love will not leave your heart even when they depart from you. They will become part of your self and thus gradually build a community within you.
Those you have deeply loved become part of you. The longer you live, there will always be more people to be loved by you and to become part of your inner community. The wider your inner community becomes, the more easily you will recognize your own brothers and sisters in the strangers around you. Those who are alive within you will recognize those who are alive around you. The wider the community of your heart, the wider the community around you. Thus the pain of rejection, absence, and death can become fruitful. Yes, as you love deeply the ground of your heart will be broken more and more, but you will rejoice in the abundance of the fruit it will bear.“
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It’s better to side with love and lose then to be on the other side and win. Because without love, you never really win…
The truth is I’ve wrestled with love… Because you can’t quantify it or qualify it. It just is. Now the difficulty with love is that it’s a double-edged sword. It always hopes (1 Corinthians 13:7), but it will still hope even when it’s painful. Even when all seems lost and all is bleak, if you love, you will keep on hoping because that’s what love does. So I understand why I would find myself still hoping, but what if that hope never materializes? What then? Honestly I don’t have an answer, but what I do know is that the next verse says that love never fails (1 Corinthians 13:8). Love might keep you hoping and might end with only a single strand of hope, but still it’ll never fail.
So love on.
Love enough to hope.
Love enough to hold on.
Love enough to let go.
Love enough to rewrite the story written off.
Love enough to allow a new story to begin.
Just love. And love deeply.
That was deep.