El amor

 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.