life sustaining love

Love is limitless. It is overwhelming. It is life giving. It is wonderfully addictive. 

Have you ever been completely overwhelmed by love? Have you ever gone to bed so love-full that you can barely sleep as you recount over and over again that love’s source and its boundlessness?

I am not just speaking of romantic love. I am speaking of all sorts of love. I am speaking of a house filled with good friends that stay up late into the night laughing, misbehaving, and sharing their lives with one another. I am speaking of sleeping children, their delicate hands curled near their faces; simply the sight of these tender bodies sprawled in bed fills your heart to capacity. I am speaking of that first love that is so real, so innocent, that it does not seem possible that it will ever change. I am speaking of a dog bounding to the door, greeting you with a love that yes is non-human, but still very real and life-giving. I am speaking of a shared love that’s memory is so long that words never need to be spoken. I am speaking of the love, in all of its varied connections, which sustains us in every chapter of our lives.

I am a deeply blessed woman. I am married to the love of my life and my three children cause my heart to sing nearly every day (there are some days they simple challenge my patience). I write this not to sound arrogant or even charmed, but because I acknowledge openly how good I have it not as a result of my own doing, but simply out of sheer luck—or in religious terms grace. Yet I have become aware that my view of the sort of love that fills you up to bursting and sustains you each and every day has been far too narrow. I am the sort of woman who has lacked such love-imagination that I have assumed if my husband died my life would end. I am the sort of limited person who forgets that there is so much love in this world that if we just pay attention we will see it bouncing around us like charged electrons.  

I have had the rare opportunity to be in relationship with people who seem to steep themselves in daily love. Amazingly these folks are not all married and are not all parents. (Remember: I admitted to my lack of love-imagination). I have observed much love this year: a shared transformational love among a group of women, a childless individual who embraces every child around them with an eager love, a single person who spends little time in self-pity but creates endless non-romantic ways to share love with others, a broken-down-by–life’s-hardships person who never ceases to rejoice in the joy of community and the love it brings to her life, a new again to love man who wells up with tears every time he speaks of his new love, a teenager who has discovered for the first time the wonder of being romantically loved by another, and the pure enjoyment of children who love another because they yet know there is any other way to feel.

Love is limitless. It is overwhelming. It is life giving. It is wonderfully addictive.

Loves ultimate source must be God. What other explanation could there be?

Go out this day and share some love, receive some love, get overwhelmed and rejoice at the wonder of this life sustaining force. 

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