A Love Letter…

Every now and then you see something in someone else’s life that really strikes your chords of compassion. For me, it is when I see people suffering or stuck in miserable places feeling like there is no way out. Inside I have always had a desire to help even from a young boy into my present age. Recently, I starting producing a short video on Tik Tok every Friday night called Old Fashioned Friday (#OFF) where I make a delicious Old Fashioned with a wide variety of bourbons and other ingredients. I find it oddly ridiculous and for that reason hilarious. Yet, I end every episode by saying, “I hope you are enjoying your life!” I hope you are enjoying your life. To me, that is the very essence of living. God gave us life to enjoy, not to survive. The reason so many folks are only surviving is because they got convinced life was something they needed to do on their own. As if adulthood was a magical nirvana where it all came together and they would know exactly what to do. But, it didn’t work out that way did it? It is actually chock full of twists and curves that you never really saw coming. I know because I’ve been there. In my short 60 plus years on earth, I’ve had my share of disasters, humiliations, pain and suffering. Some things I suffered with for way too long. I’ve also been on some mountaintops, winning, prospering and feeling sublime. Walking on the high road assured, confident and unstoppable. I at least have some idea how this thing works and because I’m secretly just like you, I know what life is like at times. For this I offer you a love letter.

First of all, I love you. Not because you do everything right or treat me in a favorable way. That’s not how love is supposed to work. I love you because you are a human being and I have a pretty good idea what you have gone through. I know underneath that mask of, “I got it” – you don’t got it (smile). You have some of the same doubts and fears I still foolishly entertain at times. You suffered, some of you much more than others. You have been doing your best to navigate without having access to the whole map. You trusted your logic and intuition and it wasn’t always enough or, for that matter, right. You reached impasses and boulders that impeded you, sometimes still impeding you to this day. You ran headlong into “life suckers” with no apparent solutions or hope of an answer. For that reason, I love you. I hope you are enjoying your life. I hope you finally gain the good sense to stop trying to do this thing alone. For goodness sakes, I hope you finally reach upward, not outward. You are reaching outward to people, usually, also trying to mask their own futility. That’s where all the dumb sayings live. Those grand intellectual conclusions about life that have no basis in the spirit, only in the flesh, complete with all of its limits and hard stops. I love you because it was love that finally got me to stop depending entirely upon myself and love that keeps reminding me unto this day. Sometimes, because you are just like me, all you really need is for someone to love you, accept you for who you want to be and above all else let you live your own life. When you experience love, God’s love, it melts down all of that falsity that used to toss you to and fro. It settles down that world of agitation and anxiety inside and shines the light on your path with which you begin to see the true source of your own troubles. Absent God, not religion, you won’t ever make the connection, try as you might. You, like me, need lots of love.

You likely know by now that life or I should say your experience of it can get to you at times. Your real opponent ever hidden and always disguised works in secret to, pardon my explicit French, fuck your life up. Every fucked up thing that ever happened to you was devised by him. Every painful humiliation, every loss, every disease, every dark thing came from him and his minions. But, you will never see it until you look with your spiritual eyes. There will be some apparent reason for it, no matter how awful it was. You see, this enemy of ours is abject cruelty. He exists now only to steal and to kill and to destroy. And he has been stealing from you. What happens to a man or woman’s soul to get them to the place where they do not even love themselves. What heaviness has prevailed to the place where we no longer even expect good things to happen for us because (insert a lie here). For that I offer you love. Perfect love casts out fear. You need to learn to love yourself again. You aint half as bad as you have imagined. You are not the source of evil no matter how many times you got caught up in it. Have some compassion on yourself. You have been fighting something bigger than yourself on your own wits. You’ve been looking for wrong in all the wrong places, namely yourself. You are no more the source of your own problems than you are the one that makes the sun come up each day. Life aint all about what you do. It’s all about what He did and does for you. Man, you gotta find Him. Momma, you have to reach upwards. Your life will always be first spiritual and you can’t skip that part. You are not going to figure this all out for yourself. You just need someone to love you back into loving yourself. That is what someone did for me. (Thank you Jon) I love you.

No love letter would be complete without one concluding thought. This living life thing can turn out badly for you. You can find yourself miles from where you ever thought you would be. Things are going to hurt you at your heart level. You can blow it on an epic level. But, if you can ever somehow get yourself to the place where you stop making it all about you, you can finally find the Author. You can find that part of you that has deep hunger for Him. And in finding Him, you find the life, your life for which you have been searching. I love you endlessly, my friend.

Just some good thoughts…