Love has us all

 

But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. (Luke 6:35)

Nothing is less realistic than imagining you can work up pleasant thoughts about those who hurt or belittled you. We carry a thousand wounds from childhood and whenever we have been injured along the way, typically trying to push them aside as we age as if that were possible.

Ignore them as we may, they remain in wounded corners of the psyche, appearing at unpredictable times to remind us that there is work left undone.

Take a long walk away from the noise of traffic, construction down the street, a plane overhead, the music of a familiar voice calling you to necessities of the day. Soon enough, the mind becomes a quiet pool from whose depths  memories appear, words you wish you’d never heard, a disparaging glance, slights large and small that still cut from decades past.

No act of will can make them disappear, and the self-righteous ego rails against the hurt, conjuring reprisals to hurl against the ghosts that haunt your wounded heart. Or maybe that’s just me.

But I doubt it.

The necessary work is that of forgiveness, which is a really an invitation to ride the wave of a very great love, letting it pick you up and carry you along until it breaks on the rocks, splashing over the wounded places in your heart and the wounding faces you have long carried.

Maybe then you can see them as they are, every one of them as imperfect as yourself and as needy. And as loved, by the Love who is that wave longing to lift us from old hurts into the freedom to let it go, knowing ... Love has us all, every last one of us.

It the only healing.

David L. Miller