A little over a year
ago, someone who really is one of my very best friends talked to me for several
hours and taught me about love. Together
we learned that I didn’t quite know what love was. I didn’t know how to love others and
especially didn’t know how to show the love that I really did feel. And I most certainly didn’t know how to let
myself be loved. All I knew of love was
that sometimes it was kindness and goodness and happiness, but a lot of times
it was me putting my whole heart into making someone happy who wouldn’t be happy and it almost killed
me. And so love, wholehearted sacrifice,
absolutely terrified me.
So that night we talked about learning to love and to be
loved. And I realized that all my hopes
lay with Him who had loved so completely and wholly that He had given
everything, and not just for those who wanted it, but for those who hated and
rejected Him.
That was when I started asking for Him to teach me. It didn’t come quickly or easily, but it
came. And then one day I realized that I
had completely ceased to matter in the most beautiful and perfect way. So many people meant the world to me, people
nothing like me in education, background, personality, skin color, culture, sense
of humor—but people who were fundamentally children of the same Father. He changed my heart so that I could love them
entirely, without any fear that they would hurt me.
Did they hurt me? Of
course they did. I cried and cried over almost
all of them. But the miracle was that
letting them hurt me only made my love even stronger and enlarged my capacity
to love even more people with even more intensity.
And still, when I think of love, I look at the Spanish flag
above my bed. That is and always will be
a symbol to me of the best and purest kind of love.
