Don’t Give Up
It is always illogical and often not very gratifying,
But we must never give up.
It is difficult, but we need to try.
It is risky, but we need to persevere.
It is the greatest, unknown, little used
Source of joy and of interior peace:
Love one another as I have loved you.
Don’t think, love now.
Don’t look for revenge, love now.
Don’t judge, love now.
Don’t try to change other people, love now.
Don’t justify and don’t apologize for yourself, love now.
Don’t expect, love now.
Don’t calculate, love now.
Don’t wait to be better, love now.
Don’t wait until others are better than you are, love now.
Love others as Jesus loved us. Try it. Let’s try it. Let’s try it for a little piece of our lives.
Love like Jesus, without planning, expecting, verifying, judging. Don’t love according to your way of thinking. What you or we think is love is only possession, clingingness. Do you want some proof? As soon as things don’t go how we planned or hoped for, as soon as something makes us suffer with regard to someone we say we love, we get very angry, we feel bad, we feel terrible, we hurt ourselves and we hurt others. And we get very angry with the person we said we loved. Love does not get angry (1 Cor 13:5).
Love like Jesus loved us.
We think loving means caring when everything is going well, when there is an attraction, when there is something deeply beautiful to love. Jesus pours his love on us when we are not lovable, we are sinners, shameful, traitors, murderers, slow to believe, silly, superficial. Human love loves what it likes. Jesus’ love likes everything that he loves.
Jesus does not wait for us to be saints to love us. He loves us like just as we are right now and it is this gratuitous love that makes us saints.
When someone betrays you, sins against you, does not treat you as you would like, that is the moment to see if finally love and forgiveness and not just possession, clingingness and anger can be born from your heart. The most efficacious love is not the one that wants to change or convert the life of others – be they children, husband, friends – but it is love that makes us decide to change and convert ourselves.
Only converted individuals can spend their lives for the persons that they like or even for those they don’t like very much. Certainly the most difficult love to live and understand is the supreme - certainly divine - capacity to abstain from wanting to change the other person but to strive to change oneself. Whenever - in the name of what we consider to be a great ideal - we try to change someone else, it is not love, but possession. It is very hard, yet at the very same time sweet, but it is commandment Jesus left us: love one another as I loved you.