Expressing Ourselves

Connection, Love, Relationships 0

Love is not denying ourselves and doing for others; rather, it is honestly expressing whatever our feelings and needs are and empathically receiving the other person’s feelings and needs. To receive empathically does not mean that you must comply — just accurately receive what is expressed as a gift of life from the other person. Love is honestly expressing our own needs; that doesn’t mean making demands, but just, “Here I am. Here’s what I like.”

— Marshall Rosenberg, PhD, Living Nonviolent Communication, p. 29

Unique in How We Are Loved

Love, Relationships 0

You matter to me. Reading those words, I thought my heart would burst. That is the crux of love, one person mattering to another person, one existence that is important among all other lives. One person can count for something individual and special. We are not interchangeable. We are unique in how we are loved.

— Nina Sankovitch, My Year of Magical Reading, p. 127

Change

Letting Go, Life, Love 0

Letting go necessitates being with the fear that comes when we become aware that all that we love in the world — our very life itself — is impermanent. It can bring tremendous relief and rest to let go where we are trying to hold on, trying to keep the same those things which by their very nature are constantly changing. This does not mean loving life and the world any less fiercely. Loving well and living fully are not the same as holding on.

— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance, p. 178

Something There

God, Love 0

Say what they say, some may doubt the eexistence of God, but everyone is certain of the existence of love. Something is there, then, beyond our lives, that for lack of a better word I’ll call spirit. Some know it by other names. I know it only as love.

— Sandra Cisneros, Have You Seen Marie?, p. 94

Here For You Always

God, Love, Trust 0

“I am here for you always” — those are a lover’s words. They seek to calm the fear that lurks at the heart of every lover, the fear that one day we will be abandoned and again alone. We can celebrate these words. We can hold to them. It is God’s promise to us to never abandon us. It is this promise to which we must cling when we are in times of darkness.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 160

The Last Word

God, Love 0

I know this is not the current version of what is psychologically “correct,” because we all seem to think we need nothing but unconditional love. Any law, correction, rule, or limitation is another word for conditional love. It is interesting to me that very clear passages describing both God’s conditional love and also God’s unconditional love are found in the same Scriptures, like Deuteronomy and John’s Gospel. The only real biblical promise is that unconditional love will have the last word!

— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, p. 33

Why Jesus Came

Faith, God, Healing, Joy, Love, Redemption, Universalism 0

Love is what God is,
love is why Jesus came,
and love is why he continues to come
year after year to person after person. . . .

May you experience this vast,
expansive, infinite, indestructible love
that has been yours all along.
May you discover that this love is as wide
as the sky and as small as the cracks in
your heart no one else knows about.
And may you know,
deep in your bones,
that love wins.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 197-198

A Party

God, Love, Universalism 0

Neither son understands that the father’s love was never about any of that. The father’s love cannot be earned, and it cannot be taken away.

It just is.

It’s a party,
a celebration,
an occasion without beginning and without end.

It goes on, well into the night,
and into the next day,
and the next
and the next.
Without any finish in sight.

Your deepest, darkest sins and your shameful secrets are simply irrelevant when it comes to the counterintuitive, ecstatic announcement of the gospel.

So are your goodness, your rightness, your church attendance, and all of the wise, moral, mature decisions you have made and actions you have taken.

It simply doesn’t matter when it comes to the surprising, unexpected declaration that God’s love simply is yours.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 187-188

Freedom

God, Joy, Love 0

There is another dimension to the violent, demanding God, the one people need Jesus to rescue them from. We see it in the words of the older brother, when he says he “never even disobeyed.” You can sense the anxiety in his defense, the paranoid awareness that he believed his father was looking over his shoulder the whole time, waiting and watching to catch him in disobedience. The violent God creates profound worry in people. Tension. Stress. This God is supposed to bring peace, that’s how the pitch goes, but in the end this God can easily produce followers who are paralyzed and catatonic, full of fear. Whatever you do, don’t step out of line or give this God any reason to be displeased, because who knows what will be unleashed.

Jesus frees us from that,
because his kind of love simply does away with fear.
Once again, the words of the father in the story,
the one who joyously, generously declares:
“You are always with me,
and everything I have is yours.”

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 184

Trust

Faith, God, Love, Trials, Trust 0

I brought you out of that prison to bring you into the freedom of love. If you love Me only when I immediately satisfy your desires, your love is merely one more form of self-centeredness. Your love becomes trust only when you choose to believe that I brought you out of something bad to bring you into something good before you experience that something good. Then your love is sustained by confidence in My character, not by enjoyment of current blessings.

— Larry Crabb, God’s Love Letters to You, p. 14