It seems to me that I have a choice to make.
Pain is often a tool that teaches us what not to do. When you touch something that is too hot, it hurts, the pain tells you not to touch it again. The synapses in our body are clever like that, teaching us to respond.
I am in pain, and if I were to purposefully avoid this pain again, which I have experienced again and again over the last few years I would have to close my heart to the world. I would have to not love as deeply, as much, I would have to stop being open and love. I would have to learn how not to love the way I love. I would have to learn how to be someone other than me. The world tells me to do this, the people around me tell me to do this, they see me grieve, they see my tears and they tell me that I need to find another way, a way to stop caring so much about everyone (that isn't how they say it, but that is what it would be).
God has given me a gift in how I love.
You, whoever you are reading this (even if we've never met), I love you, because you are, you exist, you are a human being made in God's image. You are beautiful and I love you, because you are. I'm not sure how this is possible because I look around me and no one else seems to have that (the capacity to love even the stranger they've never met without knowing anything about them). When I get to know someone that love grows, deeper and deeper, and it is wonderful, to know a person, even just a little. I, when I used to have really horrible days, would walk down the street trying not to cry, then I would see someone, or walk onto a bus and I would smile, at the people who passed me by, at the bus drivers (they knew me as the smiling girl with the 'cello), because by smiling at someone I could share something of that love, of that care.
The love I have for people, for each individual in this world is huge, sometimes I barely think I can love as much as I do. When I was a child I really hated the fact that I could not know everyone in the world, because I wanted to know them, I wanted to love them better. For years I would have to remind myself that "lots of love" was not an appropriate way to end every letter I wrote... because that's what I wanted to write, because that is what I felt.
Over the years I have tried to hold back, hold back from loving, to be socially appropriate, to be acceptable, I think it's actually harder for me to live like that, it is far more difficult to try not to care, not to love. To remind myself, it's not okay to love as freely as I love, to try to cut myself off from it. It's as if I've amputated a limb, and for the last year of so I've been living like that. I've been living trying not to love, how I love. Yet by doing that, I've stopped being able to feel how much God loves me. I know that sounds odd, but for years I felt God's love surround me, then I cut myself off from that and I almost killed myself, but was rescued by God's love breaking back into my life and I started loving again. I think that's what I've had to do. God's love in my life is a real presence, is something I sense and hold in my heart, and know, and feel in every moment, except for those few years, and this last year. Cutting myself off was something very much influenced by my peers telling me, shouting at me, throwing at me, beating at me how much they hated me, it was that that did it. It was memories of that coming back that meant that I could cut myself off from that much love this year.
But enough. Enough. I cannot live like that, I cannot live without loving from the depths of my heart, all of humanity, I cannot not love you.
See the thing is, I'm sitting here, a few days away from another funeral, a funeral for someone I loved deeply.
Love like this, it is agony, it is heart ache, it is heart break. It is the most painful thing I have ever known (and I once picked up a stainless steel saucepan at 400°F), and I will cry, and I will weep. But every second of the pain is worth it. I can't learn how not to love, unless I want cut myself off from who I am, cut myself off from knowing the love of God as a sure presence in my life. That I cannot do. I could not live with that betrayal of myself, that betrayal of God and who He made me to be and this gift he gave me.
This post was going to be about how I work out how to change so the pain doesn't hurt so much and how to deal with the pain, but instead, look what happened?
So let me finish by saying. I LOVE YOU.
Lots of love,
Emma xxx
