This is how to love.
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Credit: IMBeggar
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Chapters:
Introduction
What Is Love?
Who Should I Love?
Tough Love
Forgiveness
Conclusion
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Introduction
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I love you.
Now before you laugh or make fun of me, or just think I'm weird, let me tell you what I mean by that first. I don’t mean it in some fake, warm and fuzzy, sentimental kind of way. And I’m not saying it just to be nice, or to look good, or to get you to like me.
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What Is Love?
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What I mean is, at the very least, I only want what is good for you. At the very most, I mean, I'll give myself and my life in any way I can for your good. I don’t care how I feel, or how I look, or what Im getting out of it, or if I feel like it or not. Love doesn't loop back to us. Only goes towards others.
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Who Should I Love?
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Who are you?
Well, you could be anyone. My friend, my family, my spouse, a person I like. Well, that's easy; anyone can love the people they like.
What about the person I don't like, the person who doesn't like me, the person nobody likes? What about the person I totally disagree with, the person who's completely different from me, the person I want to hate, the person everyone hates, the person who repulses me? It doesn't matter.
Love doesn't pick and choose who to love, just like the sun doesn’t pick and choose who to shine on; it just shines.
What is your good? Well, it's all those little things that are going to help us find the one thing that we all want, that we’re all searching for, happiness. As much as we can find here in this life, but more importantly, the full happiness that we can only find in the next life.
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Tough Love
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I'll love you no matter what you do, but that doesn't mean I’m going to love everything you do.
Love has to be tough, sometimes even fierce. If you do anything that's going to harm, impede, poison, delay, or divert your good or the good of anyone else's, I have to stand against it, not you.
Even if it's awkward, even if it's unpopular, even if it's going to turn you against me, for a little while but even when love is tough, love is always patient.
That's why we have a whole lifetime. Love is always gentle, kind, tender, loving, never pushy, preachy, pointing fingers, rigid, or mean.
I don’t care what you’ve done, or how big you've screwed up, or how vast our differences are, or if your life is a giant, global-sized disaster. Love is bigger than all these things, and I don't care how worthless, flawed, unloveable, or insignificant you think you may be.
Love breaks through all these, and if you get hurt, which we do, or get into trouble, which we do, or get beat up by the world, which we will, and you're tired, and angry, and bitter, and miserable, and scared, and feel like you're drifting all alone in a sea of sufferinging, suffer with you.
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Forgiveness
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If we disagree and get into those epic fights, which we will, and even if you betray me, laugh at me, and make me look stupid, and walk away a thousand times.
I'll forgive you a million times, because nothing that could ever happen in this tiny little universe that could ever be more important to me than you. Not even myself.
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Conclusion
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This is what I mean when I say I love you, but this is not my love. My love is weak and self-centred at best. This is His love, and He commanded, go out there and love one another as I loved you.
So I'll say it again, even though I know I'm going to fail at it a million times today.
I love you.
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If I understand all mysteries, and have all knowledge, and have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love. I am nothing.
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