see love

Sometimes, in this troubled world of ours, we forget that love is all around us. We imagine the worst of other people and withdraw into our own shells. But try this simple test: Stand still in any crowded place and watch the people around you. Within a very short time, you will begin to see love, and you will see it over and over and over. A young mother talking to her child, a couple laughing together as they walk by, an older man holding the door for a stranger—small signs of love are everywhere. The more you look, the more you will see. Love is literally everywhere. We are surrounded by love.

 

Steven Charleston, Ladder to the Light:

An Indigenous Elder’s Meditations on Hope and Courage (Broadleaf: 2021), 60–61, 67.

_______________________________________

 

Sometimes it is hard to believe in the arc of love

Sometimes it is difficult to say

LOVE WINS

and mean it

 

All around us we see people doing awful things

Believing lies

Doubling down on guns and violence

Choosing the way of abusive power and domination

Marginalizing and minimizing other

Destroying justice

Enriching the rich, abandoning the poor

 

All around us we see anger, and despair

We see angry people with guns kill without reason

We see people, despairing, take their own lives

We see wars and hear rumors of wars

 

This wounds our souls

we are pierced through by the hate, the racism, the greed

 

and we cannot heal from these wounds

we cannot keep going in love

we cannot keep the flickering light of the Spirit burning

 

unless we believe that in the end

God get’s God’s way

In the end

Love wins

 

As I look at my country

And watch it unravel and spin

into authoritarianism and nationalism

 

when it feels so much

as if evil is winning

 

the only way I can keep going

keep preaching the good news

keep giving

keep serving

keep forgiving

keep loving

 

is if I believe that Love will win

that it WILL win

even if not in my life time

 

if I believe Love wins,

even if the path to the ascendance of love

is through the valley of destruction and death

 

Jesus is my model

that one who entered Jerusalem

knowing that from a short view

he was going to fail

 

knowing that his flash of popularity

would disappear,

and he would be rejected, even reviled,

knowing that he would be betrayed,

knowing the torturous path to the cross

 

but still stayed the course of love

because he also knew that in end

love would win

even if that win would come on the other side of death

 

so this day, l remember

good people and good works

I remember sacrifices made

 

this day I chose to look around me

and see love

in all the small places

 

and I will have hope

and I will keep loving

and I will keep moving toward the kingdom

 

left foot

right foot

left foot

breathe