Love

1. What is love?
In our human state, we tend to think of love in its romantic version, the feeling of having a soul mate with whom we fulfill the felt need for affection and belongingness with someone "special" for us. But I believe and experience love in another sense of the world.

Love to me is my awareness that all people are my holy "brothers and sisters" and to whom I wish to extend an openness and the right to be themselves, wherever they are at in the healing process, with no judgment whatsoever. Love is to "be there" for them and to fulfill whatever intention God has for me with them, knowing that we are all lost "sheep" and dependent upon God to return us to the kingdom. That becomes my job of "loving" while still in this world. Nor is there any need for others to treat me in some approving way that pleases me for my attentiveness and commitment to them.

2. How do I come to understand the fullness of that word?
The understanding of such a state of mind only comes from experiencing it. We, in our human mind, are nowhere near the practice of such a state. We see people as apart from us. There is a distance, a subtle or sometimes very prominent distrust and wariness of them, and lurking within, the fear that they can do injury to us, be it bodily and/or emotionally. So any sense of vulnerability negates the experience of that state.

So, the state is grown into by our desire to permit the Spirit to begin the healing process with us. The more we recover our true identity as the eternal children of God, concomitantly, as part of that eternal state itself, we experience the emotion of that state, which is love. Again, it is the Holy Spirit which is responsible for the pace of recovering it and the gradual realization of the fullness of the state... as much as we can absorb it while still in the bodily dimension.

3. Is love what it is all about?
I think so, - the recovery of our divine identity and the living of love within it. We are meant to express it in this world as a beacon for those seeking God, and who need to see God's unconditional loving quality in order to assure them of the safety of His presence and His feelings about us.

4. How do I learn to love the way God intended me to?
Your very desire to deepen love in you is the indicator that already this is happening. Our human mind sure doesn't wish to love, in fact other than romantic love, and wishing for the other person to please us, and fulfill our feelings of need, the human mind does not have the slightest idea of what spiritual or divine love is.

You've thus placed the issue of loving more deeply in the hands of God Who is working the process with you. That deeper love is already in you and part of you. It's just covered up by the human mind. Thus God does not have to create such a love within you. It's already there. By His simply peeling away those layers of distorted beliefs of neediness and control of others to meet your demands, bit by bit God enables you to recover the experience and the quality of that love and naturally express it because of the joy and fulfillment that it brings to you in comparison with the previous limitations of the human mind.

5. What is the number one opposing force of love?
It's the belief that we are incomplete and needy. Thus we have to get, be a taker, because we feel vulnerable from that incompleteness. Spiritual love has no sense of incompleteness. It is fulfilled by giving away to another attentiveness, devotion to well-being, and support of God's work with the other in order to restore within them the sense of well-being as well.

6. How do I know if I love or if it's a different feeling?
Love is fulfilled by giving of devotion to the other's well-being without any need of response. It is the same act towards all people, wanting nothing but well-being and peace for them as we have in ourselves. It is also closely hooked to forgiveness, needing to see others when they react in some negative fashion simply as lost, not knowing how to act in any other way than what they are doing, and seeking like we are for a healing.

If we deny that to someone (and it is learned person by person), that represents an as yet incomplete fruition of love. But God intends for all His children to recover it in its fullness for that is the source of their greatest joy in the spiritual life.

7. How do I love like God loves?
You will love as God loves to the extent that He can bring that to you in this human world. Since the human mind is always nagging at us, and never stops it, there have to be impediments to its fullest expression, and I suspect can only be totally fulfilled in the spirit world, devoid of the human barriers and interruptions of such love.

8. Why love at all?
It is the act of completed fulfillment. It brings joy to give it away. It brings peace and gratitude to be able to share it. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preservers. Love never fails. --- Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never fails. (1 Corinthians 13).

God will certainly direct our prayer life as well in order to nurture the process. He will enable us to become aware when we are in an unloving state and to turn to Him, our Source for healing and pray, e.g. - "God, I hand to You what I'm feeling towards __________ and ask instead that I be able to relate to ________ as You would." Remember Jesus' injunction about love- loving others as He loved us? That is delivered to us by our wishing His intervention in that moment through prayer. It is also relevant to ask God to feel about our self as He does. So frequently we feel down about ourselves, negatively judgmental. The Holy Spirit will signal you that you are in a negative state, and thus provide you with the opportunity to ask God to see yourself as He does and be loving of yourself as He is.