Receiving Love in All Things
All of creation is an overflowing gift of God’s Love. Every being brought into existence reveals something of our Lord—His goodness, His wisdom, His beauty. And together, through creation itself, we return to Him a silent hymn of gratitude for all things.
After the Fall, however, a sickness entered the human person. Our vision of what is “good” became narrow and self-centered. We began to confuse goodness with preference. If we dislike a food, we call it bad. If something challenges us, discomforts us, or resists our taste, we judge it as lacking goodness—rather than recognizing that it may be good, even if we do not yet have the capacity to receive it.
Worse still, we often accept this limitation as fixed—believing our inability to love or enjoy something is simply “how we are,” rather than a consequence of our fallen nature. We settle into restriction, instead of healing.
Yet we were made in the image of God. And to be made in His image means we were made with the capacity to love as He loves. History itself bears witness to this truth: collectively, humanity has loved all kinds of people, all kinds of places, all kinds of expressions of beauty. This means such love is not impossible for us—it is simply incomplete within us.
We are capable of loving beyond instinct and preference. We can love people despite how they act, what they believe, or how they appear. We can discover beauty where we once expected none. We can hear meaning in music we never imagined listening to, and taste joy in things once foreign to us. This is not achieved by force, but by the expansion of the soul—by increasing our capacity to receive Love.
Love, once purified, does not rise and fall with feeling. It does not depend on pleasure or comfort. It remains Love.
Christ revealed this to us. He showed that Love takes many forms and meets people exactly where they are. Love can appear as gentle kindness or quiet wisdom—but it can also appear as firm rebuke, painful correction, hunger, suffering, and even death. None of these are outside Love when they are lived in Truth.
What matters, then, is that we first run toward Truth and understanding. Only then can we begin to live from the soul—using the nous, the spiritual mind—rather than being ruled by the loud bodily mind that judges according to sensation, comfort, and fear.
As we seek Love everywhere—encouraged by the Truth that it is present in all things—we slowly begin to reap what we sow. Our souls widen. Our vision clears. What once felt bitter becomes bearable, then meaningful, and sometimes even beautiful.
And in this way, Love teaches us to love.