I choose Love. My Supreme Father is Love. My earthly father chose Love. My earthly mother chose Love. I choose Love. My children choose Love. Every day, I see more of love displacing our family’s pain, because we choose to make it so.
I know exactly who my enemy is, and so while I mourn many ills in life, I ask my Father to help me to remember that my enemy does not have a human face. My enemy, whom I shall not name, is the instigator of evil, the creator of crosses, the designer of destructive distraction, the wanter of worship, devoid of love.
He wishes me to live in fear so that my mind will be too clouded to turn to Love. I refuse. I choose love.
Our collective human pain is bound up in crosses, so many crosses, all meant to divide us. I could write an epistle on our crosses. I could write a list, a list that would never end, of the ills and the isms that separate us from each other, and which make it so much harder to love. But I won’t. Today, I’ll just mention one. Racism. The attached pictures define it. Sterling K. Browne speaks to it: https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=264456458069828&_rdr
This is the legacy of modern human relationships.
It is impossible to legislate away the psychological impact of this type of behaviour. Legislation may make racism illegal, but legislation cannot dig deep, unearth the experiences, process them, cognitively integrate them, and choose to change the neurological pathways that pass these conscious and unconscious ways of seeing each other down to our children. We must each personally choose to engage in that process. There is no other way; any other claim to victory is pyrrhic; we stifle others and we do the same to ourselves.
The means of suffocation is not usually as graphic as a knee nonchalantly ground into one’s throat, but every so often these visibly tragic events vividly remind us of how intentionally we have to breathe in order to bear the subconscious evil that haunts us, and which we daily carry as crosses meant to torture instead of seeking to redeem relationships and restore love.
This evil will continue for many more generations if individually and collectively we fail to choose the cultivation of love.
If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:1-7,11-13 – https://www.biblegateway.com/passage?search=1%20Corinthians%2013:1-7,11-13&version=NLT
Photo 1: The lynching of Reuben Stacy
“Reuben Stacy, a 37-year-old black man, hangs from a tree on Old Davie Road in Fort Lauderdale, blood trickling down his body and dripping off his toes. Behind him, a white girl, about 7 years old, looks on, a strange smile on her face as she takes in the sight of the “strange fruit” her elders had just created that hot day in July 1935.”
Photo 2
The lynching of Sam Hose https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/lynchings-sadism-white-men-why-america-must-atone
Photo 3
Japanese Americans/Canadians being herded and transported to internment camps https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/internment-of-japanese-canadians
Photo 4
Passengers aboard the Komagata Maru
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/komagata-maru
Photo 5
Before and after arriving at residential school to “kill the Indian in the child”.
https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/
Photo 6
The murder of George Floyd
Photo 7
Amy Cooper attempts to use police to subdue and humiliate Christopher Cooper
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-video-african-american-trnd/index.html
Of Thunderstorms and Rainbows 