“When you allow yourself to be loved, that love transforms you. When you love something or someone, your love transforms it or them. When you love someone or something, you begin to see it more clearly. When you see something more clearly and it is light, you fall in love with it.”
Laura Lane from ‘I Touch the Heavens’
In Dave Blanchard’s book Today I Begin a New Life, he talks about Og Mandino’s teachings about love. I love his explanation of the different forms of love, specifically his definition of charity. Charity comes from the Greek word agape—which is a heightened level of awareness, to see someone as God sees him or her.
As I view others the way God sees them, with all their frailties and weaknesses as well as their strengths, I can learn to treat them tenderly, view them from God’s perspective: lovingly, tenderly and patiently with love and respect.
“Love is an expression of tenderness” Yann Dall’aglio
I was watching a video today about a man who lived a chaotic lifestyle filled with drugs and crime. One day while he looked in a mirror, as he leaned over that mirror to do a line of cocaine, he realized God had created him to do way more in his life than this.
That realization is not an anomaly. I would wager that everyone who has walked through the doors to church, to temple, to synagogue, to mosque, has had a moment in their life, a moment of regret that God wanted more for them then they were currently living up to.
All of us have come up short from the standards God has set for us, fallen short and missed the mark. Christians use the word Sin, which is actually an old archery term meaning to miss the mark. We all miss the mark.
Jesus knew this when he challenged the scribes and Pharisees who brought to him the woman taken in adultery. “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
God says to us just as Jesus said to the woman, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”
“The moment we are loving someone, we are no longer judging them.” Mother Teresa
God understands our troubles, our struggles, our fears and our mistakes. He wants us to pick ourselves back up, brush ourselves off and try again. He knows we can do better and we are made for better things.
Love is charity,
to see as God sees
to have clarity and perspective
to see the beauty.
I do not believe that we will be judged by a solitary moment in our lives but by the trajectory and direction we were aiming for over the span of our lifetime. And as we review our life, our life choices up until now, we must not forget that there is always an opportunity today to course correct and to head in a better direction than before.
What is the current trajectory of your life and in what way can you course correct to become more of who your Father in Heaven sees you becoming?
“If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse but if I treat you as what you are capable of becoming, I will help you become that.”
German philosopher Goethe