The Puzzle of Love - Day 1
“I’m trying to figure out how to open my heart, and I can’t,” I said to a friend.“Puzzling, isn’t it?” he replied.
Sometimes it’s so hard to get into our heart, so hard to believe that we’re lovable and that our love and presence are important in this world.Most of us have heard the word love most of our lives. Our parents told us they loved us. And whether their behavior matched their words or not, most of us wanted to believe that they did.Then we had that best friend growing up. And how about that teenage crush, and that first kiss? Who can forget that? Oh yeah, then there’s that getting-the-heartbroken stuff. That hurts.A woman I know lost her son during his teenage years. “At least he lived long enough to experience falling in love,” she said.By the time we get a little older, most of us have had a variety of experiences with love. We’ve experienced some sort of it in our family, with our friends, and in romance too. Other people tell us God loves us. But for those of us who have had histories of painful experiences with love, that can be confusing.We’re not sure what it means.Some of us went the opposite way from love during our teenage and adult years. Instead of loving ourselves, we began destroying ourselves with alcohol and other drugs. Others of us lost ourselves in love, getting hooked into relationships that just didn’t work. Then we were lucky enough to get into recovery, and we began to experience a new kind of love. And throughout this whole path, we’ve kept wondering, “Is love real?” If we have children, we know it is. I’ve heard from so many people, “I never really understood what love meant until I had a child.” Love has never taken the shape and form I thought it should or would.I have a friend who’s a jigsaw puzzle fanatic. She loves sitting and working on a puzzle. The more pieces the better. She enjoys every moment of it, from looking at the picture on the box, to dumping a heap of tiny pieces into a pile, to sorting through them, to finding through trial and error which ones fit where.Sometimes that’s what love feels like, a big puzzle we’re trying to put together. Only we don’t know what the picture on the cover looks like. And we have to get the pieces one at a time as we go along.
Value: Putting together the puzzle of love is the value this week.
From the book: 52 Weeks of Conscious Contact
