What love looks like

In the last two posts I’ve talked about motivation and how we are the divine manifestation of love in this reality.  We are love, the essence and substance and product of love.  We are what other-centered, unconditional love looks like.  God, being love, expressed Himself as love to become us.  In doing so, He took a great risk.  He lets us be who we are, free to choose who we think we are so that we might discover our true self as the divine wave on the infinite ocean.  Just like the father in the prodigal son story that Jesus shared with us, the divine releases us, as love to find our pig pens if we must.  The great risk is that we might learn nothing from the pig pen and persist in our false identities as seemingly separate automatons just going through life as independent, disconnected entities.  We are not those lies of separation.  We are not individuals.  We are one, connected in way that exceeds our capacity to process.  Our thinker is limited, but our SELF is not.  We are a finger on a hand with billions of fingers attached to an arm that is attached to the whole that encompasses the universe.  Yeah, we are one of 107 billion faces of God.  We are that big and that connected.

So when we interact with each other, the truth of our union should motivate our actions.  Sadly that doesn’t always happen.  We instead are halted by fear and like I showed in the last post, it isn’t motivation at all but the absence of motivation.  Fear stops us in our tracks and keeps us from moving forward in any way to be stuck in our false identities and psychosis.  In our fear we are suffering from the paralysis of analysis.  We are trying to think our way out of our circumstance to discover we are powerless to change or control anything.  In our woundedness, we try to possess and manipulate to “protect” ourselves, but instead we are frustrated and usually find ourselves even more wounded.  Jealousy becomes our norm.  Entitlements are our cries of desperation.

All we need do to stop the cycle and find our motivation, is settle into our true self and let love take over.

OK, all that sounds wonderful but if you haven’t experience unconditional love, true freedom, then even this post may keep you stuck in paralysis.  Sometimes we need a little shove to “see” what seems to be just beyond our reach or on the other side of some veil.  Really the kingdom of love is within us.  We don’t need to “do” anything but instead just be who we really are.  We are love and it looks like this:

Love is who you are! You are not defined by your gift or deeds. (Love gives context to faith. Moving mountains is not the point, love is.)  Love is not about defending a point of view; even if I am prepared to give away everything I have and die a martyr’s death; love does not have to prove itself by acts of supreme devotion or self sacrifice!  Love is large in being passionate about life and relentlessly patient in bearing the offenses and injuries of others with kindness. Love is completely content and strives for nothing. Love has no desire to make others feel inferior and has no need to sing its own praises.  Love is predictable and does not behave out of character. Love is not ambitious. Love is not spiteful and gets no mileage out of another’s mistakes.  Love sees no joy in injustice. Love’s delight is in everything that truth celebrates.  Love is a fortress where everyone feels protected rather than exposed! Love’s persuasion is persistent! Love believes. Love never loses hope and always remains constant in contradiction.  Love never loses its altitude!  … The quest for knowledge will be inappropriate when perfection is grasped.  What we perceived in prophetic glimpses is now concluded in completeness!  When I was an infant I spoke infant gibberish with the mind of an infant; my reasoning also was typical of an infant; how it all changed when I became a man! I am an infant no more!  There was a time of suspense, when everything we saw was merely mirrored in the prophetic word, like in an enigma; but then (when I became a man in the revelation of Christ) I gaze face-to-face; behold, I am in him! Now I may know even as I have always been known!  Now persuasion and every pleasurable expectation is completed in agape (where my soul remembers who I am!). Agape is the superlative of everything faith and hope always knew to be true about me! Love defines my eternal moment! (The Mirror Bible)

Unconditional love is unconditional acceptance without judgment (the need for punishment or retribution by an angry God).  When you are in the company of other unconditional lovers, you will experience the oooey gooey love feeling of being love, without a doubt.  But often our most difficult struggle is loving the unlovable.  I don’t mean there is something about them that keeps our love away, but that they are prickly and prone to selfishness and finger pointers.  Unconditional lovers are givers.  Sometimes the recipient of love can be a manipulative, guilt-giving, taker.  I don’t mean to be mean since we can all be like that in our most selfish controlling moments.  We all have the capacity to operate out of fear which leads to jealousy and possession or we can operate out of love, our true nature.

Jesus didn’t qualify love in any way.  He said things like don’t judge and love your enemies.  Still He had confrontations with religious leaders and the separatist of His time.  When we love, we include and never reject.  When we love, we give and don’t take.  When we love, it may be like giving a cat a bath.  Love, true love that doesn’t judge, can provoke.  It provoked the people of Jesus’ day into killing Him.  So love can be received by rejection.  Love can be received by condemnation.  Love can be received by unbelief.  Still love gives and doesn’t take.

We are all on our own journeys of discovering we are love, the divine manifestation of God on the Earth.  We will find our pig pens and stumble over our own stupidity and lash out at the ones who love us the most.  We are all capable of that kind of nonsense.  We are waking up from a great dream where we just forgot who we are and where we came from.  Loving for each of us is just being us in the middle of all our circumstance.  We get to be the real us, not the pretend selfish one who can’t see our oneness.  We get to embrace our connection with all those around us.  We get to love as the divine love we are.  Some days it will be ooey gooey.  Other days it might feel like hugging a cactus.  In all cases it is us being God to everyone we meet.

That’s what love looks like.  It looks like you being you.

Yay God!

Lance