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We’ve been walking along what I believe is a trail of healing.  Knowing the diversity of my audience, it was necessary to first get behind both beauty and our frameworks for healing. Today we go further.

The proclamation of love is that it will heal all things totally and completely and every sad or horrible thing will one day become untrue. This is so outrageous, few can actually believe it. Outside of waking from some dream, most of us don’t possess a framework for how this is possible. How can the worst things be completely transformed into love. Some even despise this idea because we’ve pessimistically concluded that some things are too good to be true.

I offer no regimen. I can only allude to love’s therapy.

Like that bit of caterpillar that continues in the butterfly, the kernel of human suffering continues deep within its transformed perspective. Time obscures our ability to see this. We struggle to see beyond the suffering which is confined to this season. In the same way we struggle to fathom the infinity of space, our rational mind struggles with limitless love. The rational mind must give way to trans-rational thinking, not irrationality.

Love is the best framework I can offer into which we place all of human suffering. Love is trans-rational. Falling in love proves this. It’s wide and deep enough for suffering which defies our understanding.

A timeshare condo never lives up to it’s sales pitch. Since love wounds us so deeply, we often find it easier to make suffering our bedfellow than to risk hoping again. Our untrusting hearts prove that love does access our deepest caverns of pain. When love touches it, we blame love rather than that which love has touched within us. Anguish is our inner spinster.

I’m not talking about love as a deferment to the afterlife. Religion carefully uses the language of love but then loads it full of burdens like a bill getting through congress (Luke 11:46). The unloving ultimatum is for us to have some suffering now or have more forever. In fear, we settle for untransformed pain and powerless, surface level love. Settlers think suffering is circumstantial, and enroll in religion’s deferment program. Faith in love reveals that suffering backfills the void where love intends to dwell. Pain is love’s benevolent check engine light. Suffering always moves in when love is evicted.

We need not evacuate this life to experience healing love. The beauty of love is that it’s here, now, and it’s tenaciously pushing in on us like our atmosphere. Ultraviolet cannot be seen with the naked eye, but our skin perceives the suns rays. Likewise, healing love isn’t perceived due to its position on the spectrum. It can only be experienced, not processed. It’s not a transaction, it’s transformation. 

Healing love is an ever-present reality. Our deepest wounds can immediately be touched if we stop defending, controlling, or hating. We set a guard outside the door of our pain, then pretend that place doesn’t exist. Our self-distractions are like boat anchors that block love from taking us to it’s end of the spectrum. We live our lives denying the existence of an island that lies just over the horizon, when it’s visible just a bit off shore. We have to get in the boat to see it.

Healing love is dynamic not static. It’s a moving target. It heals us by towing us onward with it’s promise of consummation. A taste of it will put us in its tractor beam, and that is our greatest fear. Love is all consuming and will leave nothing left of our self definitions. Being hurt by love means we didn’t go far enough, its goal is to end us. We cannot find nor preserve our life without first losing it (Matthew 16:25).

Suffering is believing we are what is wrong with us. Healing Love offers us another identity: itself. Love is just, but it’s nothing like our grasp of justice. We may despise ourselves, but love heals through restoration not judgement. Our pain causes retribution to become our scale, thus we cannot rightly measure ourself or others. Healing love dissolves retribution and appeasement. Healing love completes us if we but fall into it. Falling takes no skill, only will. Healing love comes once we realize we’re accepted just as we are.

Healing love came initially to me as complete loss in a completely ruined life. Once I had nothing to lose, I let go. Healing love showed up for me as human love and as my life’s companion through years of aridity. Healing love my appear as a loved one, a pet, a project, or a passion. Your healing love is already in your life if you have eyes to see.

Healing love will transfigure your life until it’s indistinguishable from itself. In the end all that will exist is love.