SEEK TO BE LOVING, TO GIVE LOVE

Blinding flash of the obvious: To want to be loved is the ego state...there is no God there. To seek to be loving is of God...there is no ego there.

Everybody wants to be loved...everybody including dogs, cats, plants and animals of the field, I reckon. But in seeking still more spiritual growth, we must needs look deeper. To want to be loved is basically, "I want to be popular, I want to get love." There. That's what precludes God...the want to get.

We know it's all about "me" when we're wanting to get...God and the things of God are all about giving. To want to be loved is all about getting, to seek to be loving is all about giving.

The life-lesson, the lesson that takes a lifetime to learn, is that giving love is not easy, is painful, in fact, for it requires us to let go of our ego-victory wants. We imagine that it feels as if we're stripping the very skin off our bones, thus our reasoning mind will convince us this can't be God's will. So we stop and go back to our way, trying to get love. And find again that is unsatisfactory. It fills no inner need...has all the sum and substance of "Queen for a Day." Momentary fun, faded memories...The End. Then back to that feeling of something is missing, and we're again trying to get love.

It is in the hard work of giving love that we find we must learn how to go against our own wants...and there it is. There's the conundrum. We are constitutionally incapable of doing that on our unaided will...a self-determined objective may be a great idea, but until we take that great idea to a force beyond our self, we will fail...and call it a bad idea. Simply because we can't pull it off. "God must not want us to do this," we rationalize when God knows naught of it, it's our self-determined objective.

Hey! Maybe that's why bad things happen to good people...turns them from doing good surface deeds that'll garner the approval of others and forces them to throw in the trying towel. We need to quit trying to get. We need...uh-oh...to feel utterly and necessarily hopeless...to know nothing about nothing and know we know nothing about nothing. And strongly suspect even our dog doesn't like us.

There. That is salvation on a cross, under a Bodhi tree, in a church basement. Our will must be cracked open so that we no longer are trying to get love. We finally know we are love, seeking now to give it away.

God is so good to us.

Thank you.