Loving couple in the park. Vintage retro style with light leaksIt is one thing to believe in love, another to know love, and yet another to love.

I believe in all my heart that the love of God the Father, the Holy Spirit and the son Jesus Christ is the essence of who we are and our existence.  We are one body of the love of Christ.

I have known the divine love of God the Father, the Holy Spirit and the son Jesus Christ since before my birth and carried that knowing of my creator and sustainer and brother in my soul through every day of my life.

It is the loving of one another that I am here on this earth to perfect and need to work on.  It is the loving of one another that I was greatly struggling with the other day.  In a whirlwind of events,  I came to an understanding of love that I never had before.

I had had an emotionally draining week…a culmination of 5 days of caring for my sick child, anxiously waiting for another child’s tryout results, and a desperate attempt to find solutions to be with friends on a spiritual retreat I was apparently not meant to be on. All the while, my husband was away on a business trip.

So the day after he returned, I spent half of the day in bed crying and sleeping and thinking.  I can’t remember the last time I did something like that. I eventually got up, lit some candles to ask for God’s light to shine upon me, took a long bath to wash myself of this negativity, the sorrow, the sickness and the stress and when I felt strong enough to do so, I joined my family downstairs and curled up by the kids who were watching TV and started reading a good book.

My husband kindly asked if I could come now and help him with the yard work.  It wasn’t as though that had been part of our plan for the day.  It was early March so it isn’t like it had to be done asap.  I said no.  He later asked if I was up to going for a walk with him.  I said no again.  My exhaustion was still hanging on and as therapeutic either of those may have been – it was all I could do to not stay in a cocoon in my bed.  Being with the rest of the family was as far as I could go today.

And doing just that I gained more strength.  It was enough to get my mind off of missing my friends and my opportunity.  I found joy watching the kids laugh and wrestle.  I had prepared for the retreat and knew the schedule of events and by evening I decided that I could recreate the support of a circle of women with a circle of my sons and husband and asked that they stand witness to my proclamation of letting go of thoughts, habits and beliefs that no longer served me as the women in my circle had done without me at the retreat.

My sons and husband stood and watched me take each strip of paper labeled with those things that did not serve me – fear, doubt, anxiety, guilt, confusion and light each one on fire from the flame of a single white candle.  The love of God can conquer all and with each feeling I let go of, I spoke of what I desired to replace it with – love, faith, courage, forgiveness and wisdom.  I was making a commitment to not only myself, but to my family and most importantly to God that I would become all that I was created to be.  And the next morning I was immediately tested.

When I woke and found my husband downstairs, I went to be with him.  He was mad, disappointed, upset as seems to be his common feelings about me lately.  I sat by him and asked what was wrong.  “Are you really not going to help me with the yard?” he said.  “Well I sure wasn’t going to yesterday but I can help you today.”  “It really hurt that you weren’t willing to go for a walk with me.  I feel really unappreciated by you.”

He said it calmly and nicely but I was absolutely furious.  Had he not realized what kind of week I had?  I am not one who breaks down often – had he no compassion?  Had he no patience to wait a day?  Had I really ever not helped him when it was necessary?

I immediately started thinking of how unsupported I feel by him but we have been down that road before and it never ends good.  We try and one up each other on who hurts the other more or who loves the other more.  I made a commitment to do things different last night and so rather than share my side this morning, I sought to be a channel of peace. I thought to myself I should “seek first to understand.”

I asked, “how is it that I could make you feel more appreciated?”  Oh boy!  A flood of things came gushing out of him.  He too had had a difficult week.  And I knew this, he is one who feels most loved by acts of service.  When someone does something for him, he feels loved.  With his difficult week and mine, I didn’t get a lot of things done that I would normally have done so he came home to a house that wasn’t the cleanest nor most organized and the fridge was getting kinda bare.  He explained he has limited time at home and all the things that needed to be done overwhelmed him and he needed to know I would help him with them.

However I will admit that he has absolutely no idea of what I do at home while he is away AND he is the type of person that if he doesn’t see it, he doesn’t believe it.  So even though there were piles of dirty clothes in the laundry room, he had no idea the washing machine was running constantly cleaning up all of the things that had been thrown up on taking a priority.  I knew I had to come up with a way to “show” him what I do for him so that he would feel loved.

“Ok, let’s make a list of all the things you feel like need to be done.  This is what I do each week and I give myself an entire week to get them done and I will be honest, usually my own list of 20-30 things still has 5-7 things that get pushed into the next week. I’m not sure I can get it all done in a week so let’s set a goal of two weeks and be flexible with the things that are not urgent.”  We argued a bit how he felt it was a matter of pride to have the yard cleaned up and looking good while I explained we are due to have at least three more snows before any flowers start to bloom so our clean up isn’t necessary for another 6 weeks.

And so on the list he came up with 15 things that needed to be done in the yard, another 18 things that needed to be done at home and I added some of the big things from my own list that he might not consider important but that were things he might appreciate when they were done so the list was over 40 items.  The boys asked him to go play ball and off they went while I set off on the list – working in the yard first because that seemed to be his beef with me yesterday and his biggest concern that I wouldn’t help him with.

In three hours time I got three of the big things done off the list, more than I expected and then I had to quit because I too caught the flu and unfortunately spent the rest of the day in bed again.

The entire time I was working in the yard however I did not spend my time feeling good about how I was making my husband feel loved.  Instead I argued with him in my head and made a list, “ Yeah!  I think you are right!  I don’t appreciate you when you …..and I don’t appreciate how you….. and I don’t  appreciate ……”  You get the idea.  Probably those three hours of such negativity is what pushed my body over the edge to get the flu.

As I laid in bed feeling awful, I tried a bit to turn things more positively and have some compassion and mercy.  At a previous retreat with the same women who would have been at the retreat I had missed, we did a powerful exercise where we were asked us to list all of the things we didn’t like about a person which I could easily do about my husband.  As I wrote my list I knew immediately what the point of it was – all the things we dislike in others are the things within ourselves that we dislike the most.    I didn’t like how he always wants things done a particular way and if I don’t do them that way he does them over the way he likes.  I’ve done that same thing to him – I have reloaded the dishwasher many a times before!

And so armed with this information, I could see how his judgements of me were really judgements of himself.   And in turn all the things I listed while I was weeding and trimming back the old dead growth in my garden, we are the things about myself that I judge harshly.

As I laid in bed sick on that second day, it finally hit me.  My husband is feeling unloved and yet I do love him so why is he not receiving it?  Every time I put a judgement on him (whether he knows it or not), I am actually taking away some of the love I have for him.  I am pulling it out, completely negating it, making it conditional on his actions rather than unconditional for who he is.  And if he is aware of my judgement, he starts putting up a wall against the judgement but that wall also blocks out my love.  The more I judge, the higher and thicker and stronger his wall becomes.  The wall cannot distinguish when to protect him from a judgement or when to be open to my love.  The wall is just a wall with no discernment so even the love I have for him will never get through.  As I thought about this, I could completely relate.  When I have felt judged, I have a steel armored wall that flies up and blocks all evil from coming to me and it never feels good.  This was a huge revelation!

No one likes to be judged!  That is why the Lord said, “Do not judge your neighbor” for by doing so you are choosing to take away love rather than give it.  God is love so when we judge, we are taking away an opportunity to feel loved, to feel God.  I would never want to be responsible for preventing someone from experiencing God, for connecting with God, for sharing God who is love.  Judging is the exact opposite of what God desires – it creates doubt in God’s goodness.

The night prior I had said I was giving up doubt and I meant I was giving up doubt in my own abilities but I revised it to give up doubt in others ability to be all that they were created to be too.  Who am I to doubt the goodness of any of God’s creations?

That is what judgement often is – a doubt in the ultimate goodness of one another.  Judgement is doubt in the perfection of God’s creation which God sees as only good.  Doubt in God’s goodness is what led Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Doubt is what led us into believing and knowing and looking for evil.

So for the rest of the evening, whenever I wanted to think something negative about my husband, our relationship, that list, I found something positive to think about him, our relationship and the list.  I didn’t want to go down the negative path at all.  There is no judgement of another that feels as satisfying as love.  I simply wanted to fill my heart back up with unconditional love for him and leave all the doubt and judgements behind.  The more I did so, the more at peace I felt.

This is mercy.  This is the kind of love Jesus gave us.  He keeps no record of wrong doings.  Despite being betrayed, judged, humiliated, unjustly tortured and misunderstood and rejected, he loves us, he forgives us, he understands and has mercy for our thoughts, our words and our actions and inactions even if they don’t match with his.  Jesus came that we might have life, he came to show us the way.  His forgiveness of our parent’s, Adam and Eve’s original sin of doubt that has been passed down generationally since the beginning of time is nothing in comparison to what we can learn and how we can live from this moment forward by his teachings from the cross of how to forgive and love fully and unconditionally with patience and kindness, without seeking our own interests or brooding over injury.  Love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.” 1 Corinthians 13:7.  Forgiveness overcomes doubt!

It is with God’s mercy and love that we can truly do “greater things than these.” John 14:12  We can overcome the doubt, the evil, the anger, frustration, shame all with forgiveness.  It is a wonderful gift we have received.  It is a teaching that was meant to change the world, it was meant to give new life, new hope and inspire a new kind of love for our husbands, our children, our families, friends and neighbors.

A merciful love is truly what it means to live on earth as it is in heaven.  Have mercy, show mercy, be merciful.

May peace be with you always!