“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” – Lao Tzu
I have heard some real doozeys through the years when it comes to love. We are always trying to explain everything we encounter in our lives. It is a natural phenomenon to make sense of everything around us. Most of us are pretty successful at it. From these explanations, I classify them often as “Crack-Pot Functionalism”, we find peace. If it all makes sense to me then I am at peace. We also look at things in life in a dichotomous way. In other words if it is not good it is bad, so everything has an opposite, good v. bad, black v. white, up v. down ad infinitum. In recovery I learned that there is a gray. That there is an in between for many aspects of our lives.
Love is one of those areas. Surely we have all heard the definitions and explanations of what love is and is not. In fact some folks make a case for inappropriate love, one example is “co-dependency”. The love that I have experienced more deeply over the past few years has been the love of God. Funny, until recently I held back from sharing that love publicly with people for personal reasons. The love I am talking about is different from anything I have ever experienced in my life. It is the love that awakens me in the morning and allows me to close my eyes at night gratefully, no matter what the challenges, successes or failures for the day were. It is a love that gives me the courage to push, to live, to give to share, to hope…
For many years I looked at God as the great Santa Claus in the sky. Today I look forward to serving God for freeing me from the bondage of addiction, for giving me life and not for what He can or will give me. The spiritual life is a great life. Life is so good today!
Go, Go, Go…
Dan 🙂