Love and fear

Love should set you free!

I wrote that line just before Bestest called and lo and behold what did we talk about!

So many of us are told that we should love our neighbor as ourselves and that love is infinite, it never runs out, that wherever two are more are gathered there is love.

We are also taught to fear contaminating love by allowing it to extend beyond one person, as if having a best friend outside of marriage will destroy something, or diminish it.

But love is not a cave made of rock, it is a concept, a feeling, perhaps the breath of god that flows in around and over us all the time. Just as a child needs a mother, father, grandmother, uncle, aunt, cousins and brothers and sisters and loves them all in different ways without taking anything away from any of the others, a healthy adult still needs this diversity to be happy and whole.

It is not necessary for "a man to leave his mother and a woman leave her home" for a marriage to thrive. In fact to believe that one person can be everything to another is a little naive. We have just learned to make do and making do causes problems.

On the other hand, sex is not love. It can be part of loving, but love can and does exist totally outside of sexual relationships, which probably should be reserved for one person, or at least one relationship at a time, in today's world.

We need to do better than just making do. We need to allow love to do its work unencumbered by fear.

Imagine a world united by so much love it crowds fear out.