LOVE AS A STRANGER

It is so sad when the heart is numb and unable to feel the most basic of all emotions. When life so brings heaviness into one's essence that this part of joy is absent from the soul.

Now that is such a tragedy. And it is even sadder when it is a matter of how this was the result of there being no love from one's parents.

So that all one feels is anger and resentment, never able to love others. Can someone who never felt love truly find a way to reach out to others?

I think the honest answer may not be the one we want to hear. It is the fact that sometimes we need to first be loved before we can share it with others.

Most of my life has been spent in love's shadow. Never quite feeling the light. Just having it told to me by those I had a hard time accepting really meant it.

In this struggle. In this way station of heartbeats, to wait for the train of passion that never truly arrives is such a challenge.

For so many years, especially in church life I pretended I believe all the lies people sad about love. I call them lies because I sure didn't feel much love from all the hate they expressed in hurtful and abusive words.

I didn't think it would ever unfold different in my life. I just accepted this was my fate. To always be an outsider who was to be ignored and forgotten.

What I did learn is how God can work miracles in that regard. He has the ability to look into our ache and touch it in a way that will make love fill the void.

Even if no other soul serves to do this in our life, God still has a way to brush our heart with so many blessed paths. To add to our essence what Satan has taken away.

The how is always specific. He may bring us into contact with a person who truly will care and treat us with love.

It may come through some means we might never imagine. But He does find a way as part of the need for inner healing.

Providing we are not totally consumed in the problem of forgiveness or hate. Those impediments that detract from our heart moving ahead.

How often that can happen to us in life. A scar or wound that only festers and never heals.

Until somewhere in the tears we feel His hand.