The One Secret To Never Keep Secret

“Love begins wherever we can truly do something for each other.”   – Gabriele Brüggemann

For something as important as love, for the most part you’re pretty much forced to figure it out on your own. The younger version of me learned about love by seeing it in action. Or, more accurately, by not seeing it in action. The examples of love I saw were for the most part silent, even secretive. Love, once initially established, tended to fall into the Understood category. You know I love you, so there isn’t really a need for me to remind you that I do. People in my world simply didn’t go around expressing their love for each other. It just wasn’t something that was done. Emotions, especially those of the loving kind, were best kept to yourself.

Especially for us males.

Maybe this describes your experience as well?

This older version of me has grown enough to grasp the idea that love can be a powerful life-changing force, an energy which can change things, including energy itself. And that energy changes people in a way only love can change them.

Love, the powerful version of love, is deep. Unconditional. Unlimited. But for love to be the force of change it can be, love needs to be proactively expressed. Consistently. Knowing someone loves you will only get you so far. But when you are proactively and consistently reminded someone loves you and has you and believes in you – especially for no specific reason other than that they do – that’s when love is at it’s most powerful, life-changing best.

Life at times can feel quite empty. Even if we are surrounded by those who love us. Those who truly love us will be there should we fall. If they notice. Perhaps, though, the greater ambition is that we proactively give our love away at such high levels that we may actually prevent those we love from falling at all.

Certainly, love can pull us out of the valleys we at times find ourselves in, but it also contains the power to lift us higher, to give us the strength to become all we were created to become.

I look back and see the events of my life, both the challenges and the opportunities, and wonder if a stronger presence of such proactive love would have had life-changing impacts on both. In those moments of loss and setbacks, would feeling such love have been a great source of comfort and recovery for me? And would that same presence of this encouraging love in my times of sowing and reaping have allowed me to bask in a far greater harvest?

Yes.

Twice.

Think back to your own personal times of darkness and uncertainty.  Could being the recipient of a perpetual wave of unconditional love have helped you get through those times? Could you being reminded how much you are loved been able to lift you higher?

Don’t those we love deserve to be reminded that they are loved?

The love we have for others shouldn’t remain a mystery. The same also applies for the love we have for ourselves. We shouldn’t only bring it out on special occasions like we do our grandmother’s silverware at Thanksgiving.

Love is too important and too powerful to be kept a secret.

Now go tell someone you love them.

And remind them often.

It’s a great day to be you!