"I was looking outside, As if love would ever want to hide"

"I was looking outside, As if love would ever want to hide," are lyrics from Matt Maher's song Alive Again. So simple, and so profound. I never thought about it, but why would love want to hide. Yet, we as people are constantly looking outside ourselves to find love and never bother to look inside ourselves and realize we are the genesis for love. We have the ability to love and the more we love the more love we create. It is exponential and it feeds upon itself. The ability to love comes from within us and yet we look outside ourselves. We look for love and acceptance from people, things and places. Why? Love does not want to hide, yet we hide it. We withhold love, we prevent persons from knowing us and loving us or we just refuse to accept love. It is a blindness or deafness we create. Supposedly, to protect ourselves from being hurt.

Yet, those who have taken the precarious step to love others and ignore the harrowing dangers of rejection find themselves surrounded by more love and respect than they ever could have imagined. I am reminded of Blessed Mother Theresa of Calcutta, who left her Order of Nuns and went out onto the streets of Calcutta and began ministering to the poorest of the poor. She ministered to the street urchins whom nobody else would go near. Before she knew what was happening she had her own Order of Nuns, and more love, adoration and respect than she ever expected. Eventually, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She found love inside of herself and gave it away freely.

It is the same kind of love that a mother experiences when she holds her child for the first time. It just spontaneously occurs. A profound love which binds a mother to her child for a lifetime and is what enables a mother to love her child no matter what their faults are. This is a love which comes from God. It is never ending and it is spontaneous and reproducable.

I myself am at fault for withholding love and looking everywhere but inside of myself to find love. I am probably one of the world's worst. I do not want my heart broken again. What kind of fool do you think I am? There is a safe feeling with being alone. It is cold and calculated and I am in complete control. I only have myself to blame and I do not have to face criticism or possibly rejection. I am strong and powerful. I keep my heart locked up tight behind a fortress any military defense system would be jealous of. No one is going to break my heart the way my ex husband did! I say that and then I instantly feel the pains of the loneliness I have brought upon myself. I think of the men whom I have dated and think of how I pushed them away by withholding love. I never allowed them to know me, nor did I allow God into the relationship. Lessons learned? Hopefully. Only the future will tell how this current relationship will go. I have to work very hard at allowing myself to be vulnerable, to allow myself to love and to ask God to do His will. Which is why these lyrics hit me so squarely in the jaw. It is so humiliating and humbling to submit myself to God, and yet when I do, God always blesses me in ways I never anticipated. To find myself in a more perfect union with God, I have to look within myself to find the never ending fountain of love which God placed within me.

Love is not hidden from us, we simply hide it from ourselves. God wants to love us and have a relationship with us. We simply have to surrender to Him and accept Him. "As if love would ever want to hide!" Why should it, it is a gift given to humanity.