WHEN WE ARE VULNERABLE WE ARE ALIVE

Since Valentine's Day was this month, I have been thinking about love, surely the most universal feeling of all.  I ran into an article by someone who wrote the following: 

The arrival of love is offered to me everyday, and everyday I have two choices.

To let love in and trust it just for this day, letting it wash over me in the gratitude that I get to feel it even for an hour.

To spend all hours of the day obsessing over if I can trust the love being offered; take out my detective notebook and look for all the holes in the story or where what is being promised didn’t line up with what happened before; and thereby block the love.

Have you ever done something like that?  If something bad has happened in the past, we may concentrate on that to the exclusion of the good that is right before our face.  That's blocking love.  It happens when we nurse a grudge, or are suspicious.  Or can't forgive.

If I have a memory or an intrusive thought, I might let it ruin (or try to) the happiness of the moment.  Sometimes I must actively remind myself:  Don't let this be hindered by something that is over. That is what I think the writer meant by not trusting the love being offered because "what is being promised didn't line up with what happened before."  

We all have our Worst Nightmares.  I don't mean "I'm not prepared," or "I'm naked."  (Apparently those are our top two.)  I mean those things that can explode under our nose or behind our back that we actually cannot prepare for, that we find out after they've happened.  Worst Nightmares almost always make us feel helpless and useless, or whatever other adjectives attach to feelings of worthlessness.  There's no preventing it because it already came true. Worst Nightmares can be traumatizing.

When we're faced with a Worst Nightmare we can let it consume our every waking thought or we can live our lives one day at a time, trusting that somewhere intimacy, joy, faith and trust will follow.  When we do that, we let love in. From other people, from God, from ourselves, from our partners and friends. We can either hear only the thoughts that paralyze us or listen to the love we are offered. The scariest and bravest thing we ever do is to love someone completely. Only when we are vulnerable are we alive.