Choose Love
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Darkness can’t drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate can’t drive out hate; only LOVE can do that.” Join us today for a discussion on love. While love is always needed, always in style, now more than ever in our crazy and torn world, we need to talk about love. We need to share stories about love.
Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.
Last week we heard from Marvin Cassler – a man who is creating a crazy, out-of-the-box story, just exactly the way he wants it to be. Listen to that episode to see an example of someone who knows how to purposefully write his very own story. This week we’re going to delve into the topic of love. I’ll be honest, writing this podcast stresses me out because love is my favorite topic. It’s my favorite because it’s the answer to everything. It’s one of the things that I really, really believe in and that I’m always trying to do better. So this podcast needs to be good. No, it needs to be great, and that type of pressure makes me want to walk away for fear that I cannot do it justice. I probably can’t, but because it’s important, let’s talk about it, and let’s roll around in some love.
In the book Lost in Translation it says, “Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. This is a fact of daily experience.”
This daily experience makes Love a loaded word. Meanings implied and created from media, from nurture, from experience. It is the thing we crave more than anything else and it is often one of the most difficult things we engage in. It provides the utmost joy and the utmost pain. A few have had real transcendental experiences where they were filled with the love of God and actually know what that feels like, an elixir they’ll do anything to get more of, but most of us look to one another, a bunch of other imperfect people, who are also looking for love, and then in the mess, everyone tries to feel and be filled. It is the burnished space of this hunger that we all function from, often looking for someone to fill us so we can reciprocate, but this is a fool’s errand. Love begets love. Hunger does not beget love. There are many facets on the diamond of love. Love of a parent is different than love for a friend, which is different than love for a lover. There is the mature choice to love a person when the hunger transitions into familiarity. Love for mankind because of our connection, love of chocolate, love of a dear pet.
When Christ was asked, in the New Testament, what the most important commandment was, he explained that the first commandment was to love God and the second was to love your neighbor as yourself. I don’t know about you, but I’m often thinking about how things will affect me and my family before I consider how it’s going to affect the guy next door. Of course, when the term “neighbor” is used, Christ was referring to all around us – to our other fellow humans here riding this rock around the sun. The older I’ve gotten and the more I practice this, the better I get at thinking win/win for everyone. Coming from a place of love and acceptance without judgment, but it’s something I’m always trying to do a little better. When someone on Facebook really irritates me it’s easy to pass quick judgment. I have to stop and remind myself to love. When I want that parking spot that’s close to the front door and I can make it in before the other person...
