When we say kindness cures cruelty, we are not denying life’s tragedy or troubles. We are simply reminding ourselves to reach deeply into an inner fountain of free flowing love our world may be missing. It’s a practice that redirects our time and energy toward a reliable flow of love that alters reality when applied.
Agape love comes free from a higher power to each of us with creation. Perfect, unconditional love! So how then do care’s opposites, such as fear, hatred and division stir within us and break us? It starts by making love, a central subject and the very signature of our lives.
When we get so engaged running after what we love with zest, no time or energy is left over to loathe or fear what we hate. We become the change we crave by stepping toward the love we desire, one action at a time.
On a daily basis we make choices to remain in God’s affection as it’s intended to energize and cherish us. Now don’t get me wrong. Not all of our choices will lead to love. Our everyday choices however, can become the engine that helps us access grace so we can awaken loving-kindness, empathy, healing and hope.
Kindness is designed into our DNA as we’re created in perfect, unconditional love! So how does fear, hatred and division too often work its damage within us and among us?
Simply stated – we learn to hand over unknown fears to a known God. In this way we remain in God’s unconditional affection as it’s intended to energize, encourage, grow and cherish us?
Consider a typical day and visualize God’s amazing grace or agape love as it shields and enables us. It’s really our love deposited by God and expressed to all those around us. It’s also about our openness to love’s flow from deep within us to all humans created in that same perfect love. Henry Ward Beecher said, “The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world’s joy.”
No question, the world can also distract us daily. While we may find that gifts of grace or unconditional love seem easy to grasp as abstract concepts, it harder to practice love boldly in a world programmed more for fear. Rather than run on an inner file of amazing grace, our knee-jerk freewill choices can nudge us into misery whenever we choose anxiety, fear or revenge.
Sadly, our world teaches us and often rewards us to practice love’s opposites. So we tend to judge others, defend ourselves and close ourselves off with boundaries or walls we build in our attempts to survive fear’s toxic remnants.
Only when we find and practice our loving relationship to God, do we reopen doors into loving relationships with others. Plato wrote, “Courage is knowing what not to fear.” Would you also agree that love transforms fear into unique opportunities to elevate our better angels and thrive?
A lifetime of my attempts to answer questions about undying love lies in each page of my recent book, ACCESS OUR GRACE MINDSET – AWAKEN LOVING-KINDNESS, EMPATHY, HEALING AND HOPE.
The world may tip us off course briefly and we may steer away from love’s center, fear yields to God’s unconditional love and gifts of grace within us, when we choose to see ourselves and all humans as cherished in God’s mind and in our reality. Each day we are given 86,400 fresh and new seconds to love and be loved. No seconds carry over into the next day, and only those in which we feel love and pay it forward help us to embrace and enjoy a love language for eternity. Just as Emily Dickinson says, “Forever is composed of nows.”
LINKS TO MY BOOKS AND MATERIALS TO GROW EMOTIONALLY AND MENTALLY HEALTHY
Grace Mindset Book – paperback
The Teen’s Growth Mindset Workbook – paperback
Growth Mindset Interactive Materials at TPT