When you love … when you love with your whole heart … there is going to be pain; it just IS.  As children, for probably every single one of us, there was a time where we loved someone, or something, with ALL our hearts … and got disappointed.  Whether it was the workaholic dad, or the mom who doted, the brother who was the role model, the sister caretaker, or the best friend you did everything with, etc. … along the way, it happened … something happened and you got hurt.  You loved with your whole heart … and your unguarded soul was put into an emotional blender.

For the rest of your life you end up being stuck in this routine of WANTING to love that way again … because THAT is the way God loves, and ultimately we crave that kind of love.  At the same time, you would do ANYTHING to avoid being hurt to such depths again.

In my prior post today, (“Mother Theresa – The Paradox“) Mother Theresa talks about getting to the point where you love until it hurts … in my mind I naturally thought, “Not only until it hurts, but beyond the hurt.”  When you go to those depths of your soul, and face what you REALLY are the most afraid of … that level of love that hurt you SO deeply … when you accept that loving that deeply also means hurt is attached to it, well … there is no more hurt … you’ve stood up to it, and come out the other side … as your TRUE SELF.  You’ve accepted it and then as your True Self decided who you want to be, where you want to go, and who you want to love … without that past pain factoring into the never-ending list of ways you avoid.

The thing is, you end up spending SO much of your life avoiding that level of love … that it has become habit.  You have all sorts of ingrained defensive mechanisms that prevent you from going to that level … even if that means subconsciously sabotoging relationships that could take you back to that place, or consciously choosing the person you KNOW will end up rejecting you.  See, if you engage in these defensive mechanisms, then you never REALLY get to that deepest part of the soul … so, even though you still get hurt, you never REALLY get hurt in that all consuming soulful way that crippled you at one point in your  life.

The problem is, you are never really being your True Self … you are being the person who is running away from pain.  When you stop, and CHOOSE to love beyond that hurt … and come out the other side … then there truly is no more hurt.  When you let all of those defensive mechanisms down, and simply face that hurt in the same state that you were in way back when (defenseless) … you realize … that it’s not your fault.  It wasn’t your fault then, and it’s not your fault now.  You don’t have to live in a world of hurt any more.  You don’t have to guard that part of yourself any more.

Face it down, give it to God, and allow God to fill that place inside you.  When you do that, you can move forward as your True Self; the person God intended you to be all along.

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Religion4All is an idea: that every human being (no matter their race, religion, sexuality, social status, lifestyle, or any other possible factor) is LOVED by God; just … as … they are.

We all are loved by God, and NO religion or person has a monopoly on it. Every single person on this planet is loved equally by God … SO many are cut off from God because they are told they don’t belong. God loves everyone … we ALL are beautiful creations … we don’t need to cringe when we hear the words “God”, or “religion”, or their judgments … God LOVES us all!

There is no requirement to change in order to be LOVED by God, or to LOVE God. God is LOVE, and LOVE is God … period. There is no one who God loves more than anyone else … there are only those who choose to LOVE more … to love God more, and consequently then to love each other more. In doing so, we grow closer to God … and know God.

By opening our hearts, and minds to God (free of boundaries like religion, or social trends); by LOVING God … we are exactly where we are meant to be. If we maintain that openness, never allowing any person or event to make us close our hearts, we will be guided by God to be who we are meant to be.

In that space of openness we can then live a life of LOVE, and be guided to where we are meant to be … forever in LOVE.

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