Day Sixteen

DAY 16

What Matters Most

Life is about Love

LOVE, something that every human being is searching for the minute they are born. A baby’s cry for it, a child’s need for it, a teenager’s hormones rage for it and adult’s lust for it. It’s an inborn yearning we all have from birth, God given and emptiness at the same time. We spend a life time searching for it. Willing to do almost anything to gain it we look in almost any place to find it, in almost any form or fashion. We spend out hard earned money to buy it in one form or another. Whether we are trying to impress someone or just make ourselves look good with things we are paying a price to find some kind of happiness to gain love and attention to ourselves. We will go to almost any length to chase after it, sometimes stepping over others and hurting them in the process with out even saying I’m sorry. Or we give of ourselves not realizing that what we are doing is really hurting our self more than we deserve to try to get the attention of someone who will never return the feelings we are putting out, but still we try to no end until we are left broken and disillusioned. So how do we learn to love with out all the pain and suffering? How did I learn?

The first place should have been in my home growing up watching my father and mother. And there were times I saw it between them, sometimes. But most of the time I did not. My father worked swing shift so I really only saw him on the weekends growing up until they were divorced at age 14. Then it seemed like a lot of arguing and fighting all the time and on Sunday’s it was just him sitting in front of the television watching some kind of sporting event that I had no interest in and that just being noisy in the room made him mad. Where is the love in that? I remember watch shows like Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch and seeing what I thought a real family was supposed to be like. Even Dennis the Menace had what seemed like a normal life, and even though he was always getting into some kind of mishap, I never saw him get hurt because of it. Sure good old George next door would scream at him but for some reason that just seemed funny instead of scary and threatening. I always asked myself, “Why couldn’t my life and my family be like theirs?” a very innocent dream for a child that didn’t know the difference between television and real life yet, brothers and sisters that didn’t fight like it was World War 2, and moms and dads that greeted each other with a hug and a kiss when they came home from work. And when the child makes a mistake, the parent sat and talked about it with them instead of waking them up in the middle of the night with the back of the hand in the dark with no explanation. Was that too much to ask God for? What was I supposed to be learning from all this? How to overcome WHAT? How to SURVIVE WHAT? Anyway I didn’t see the love in any of it. No example in my home to begin with. Except at Christmas time when it would take four hours to open presents. But yet we heard about it the rest of the year when we would ask for something and the answer we got was “we spent all our money on you at Christmas”. Again, was it love or not? Buying affection I understood. Using it as a form of trying to make up for love not shown I understood. But needed it I didn’t. So what would I do to try to get someone to LOVE ME when I grew up? Was I good enough just as me to have someone love me just as I was or would I have to do anything besides just be myself to find it? The latter always seemed easier than the first. I had no self worth entering adult hood. No self esteem, a lot of fear, a lot of self hatred. So with three strikes already against me, what did I have to work with to begin with? NOT MUCH. For some reason my looks seemed to carry me quite a ways. So I began to build on that for a while. But I soon found out that my personality traits had much to be desired. I was a nice guy who when I got emotionally hurt, it would cause those same feelings I had as a child to kick in and now that I was an adult, I could lash out a whole lot easier that I could have when I was a child. The rage inside me was monstrous. I really scared some people. And the sad thing was I didn’t know where it came from at the time. I thought all my anger was righteous anger, like they deserved it all for what they did. Couldn’t they understand, they hurt me, just them. But it wasn’t just them. It was them, my dad, my mom, myself, old friends, anyone who had ever hurt me in that manner all at once. So finding someone to love, friends or otherwise was an uphill battle for most of my life. All I wanted was to be close to people, but the more I got hurt the more I pushed people away for fear of getting hurt again. It was sometimes easier being lonely than living in the fear of not knowing when they were going to hurt me again. That was more painful than being alone without the fear of being emotionally hurt again. But when I became tired of the loneliness, how do I get rid of that and at the same time keep my distance from the emotional side of life? Become good at taking instead of getting intimate with anyone. But this still wasn’t me. I wasn’t brought up that way. I was taught to care about others and their feelings, to put others first. But as an adult, I didn’t see very much of that anymore. So I became like the rest. But to do that without all the guilt, I had to play their games under the influence of something stronger than I was. It was Me on Meth. Together we could rule the world and not care about those who got in the way. Where was the Love in That? Well I loved the drug. I loved the attention I was receiving. And I loved the fact that I wasn’t getting emotionally hurt by anyone. So wasn’t love in at least some form LOVE ENOUGH? For a while it was. And for a while what was lacking was being covered up by all the chemicals. Then why when I began to write did I write lines in them that read “searching for love and acceptance”? How was I supposed to find Love and Acceptance in a world of chemically induced affection and temporary bought and paid for love in one form or another? Not very well thank you very much. It was a never ending cycle that had me trapped so deep to even think of breaking away from it caused great fear and anxiety. How do I stop all the madness? WHO AM I? I needed to face ME before I could even begin to try facing the world. Endless weeks, months, years of contemplation and self examination has been going on behind the scenes, mostly alone in my room to get me here to the computer to be typing this. How could I even understand the love from my heavenly Father when the first example of my own father was such a mess, then the mess I made of my own self for so many years and the way I looked at the world and took advantage of others I sought attention from? I definitely didn’t know the first meaning of the word. But yet I desired it with great passion. I was scared of it also. When someone said those three little words I LOVE YOU I was always waiting for the punch line, like a comedian’s one liner. Those were just words, anyone could say them, no one could live them, no one could show me those words without saying them. One man did, one time in my life. He didn’t say it, he showed it. In a way I could only believe he really did. And when he did, I fell in love, for the first and only time in my life. It may not have been what God had planned but when you tell someone you have just been diagnosed with the AIDS virus that you have been sleeping with for a month and instead of leaving you or worse, they take you by the hand and lead you into the bedroom to make love to you again, they must care for you, they must be IN LOVE with you no matter what. Who else would do something like that? What else would anyone feel? Up to that point in my life I had never felt that kind of acceptance just for being a human being much less a person that was dying from a disease that could kill someone else. (I just got stuck here for a minute. That was a tough memory)

But I finally did get all that behind me. The chemicals eventually vanished in 2002, the needle, the spoon, the cotton and the strap around my arm. But then there was just an empty shell of a man who was all alone with his feelings, broken as they were. Afraid of his own shadow at times, I trusted literally no one. Kindness in any form always had it’s price, didn’t it? It always had in the past. Not just from others but from me to. You see I had learned how to play those games too. And now I had to unlearn those games to. If I wanted honesty from others I had to be honest with others back. I had to start caring for them the way I wanted to be cared for. I had to reach out for something else rather than reach out to take, I had to learn how to reach out to give, but to who? Others just like me. And that wasn’t hard to find. They were already all around me. I had made a life time of gathering up the weak and feeble minded, the strung out and the tore up from the floor up. And since the Lord was already on my side and ready to give me the 3000^th and 2^nd chance one more time, we together just started where we had left off so many times before. It wasn’t like starting completely over, just where we left off. Thank GOD! His love returned instantly. I didn’t have to go through a 90 day waiting period for the benefits to kick in, when he said in Psalms 116:16 that He LOOSED MY BONDS that was it, no more discussion. So Let’s go to work He said, I have a job for you to do. No more sitting around and watching TV, smoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day, get up and get out there Mike. There are people to Love, people to minister to, people that need to smile today. Someone needs what you have to give and only you have it to give them. I have given you many tools, many traits in you personality that can reach the lost and broken hearted. Joy comes in the morning, wake up and it’s yours. And you know what? It’s true. Just waking up is a joyful thing for someone that said he was happy the doctor said he had only six months to live 21 years ago. Yesterday I wrote about my family, my church family and the love and acceptance I feel there. Yesterday was no different. And the way my prayers are working I even seem to control the length of the message I am hearing (that was for you Pastor MIKE please don’t tell the rest of the church) Every face and person the Lord puts in front of me is one of His children, potentially or otherwise.

How can I not love them all?

Have you fallen IN LOVE with JESUS?