I’ve been working on loving more.  It makes me a bit uneasy just to say it.  I mean, why should I have to ‘work’ to do that?  I’m sorry to have to say it.  I know it should come more naturally – to love more – but I just went through a pretty terrific healing and one of the things I identified in my negative thinking as I worked to clean it up was that I simply needed to love more.  Love people, love what I do, love God – more.

Much of what I do is easy to love.  I live for the moments every day when I can be creative and I’m fortunate that my life seems to bring me those opportunities daily.  However, some of what I do, like everybody else, is just drudgery.  I battle through it running headlong to what I love.  I’ve learned not to put the drudgery off, but to tackle it ASAP so I can go about the things I love with freedom.

So I’ve been working more on loving the drudgery.  Or rather taking the drudgery out of the activity and going about the supposedly non-creative stuff more creatively.  To a certain extent it’s working.  I’m happier and I have less drudgery.

I’ve been working on loving people more.  This has been my most successful endeavor in this exercise because I’ve simply decided to button my lip as much as I can when I don’t have something good to say about someone.  I’ve stopped rehearsing my complaints as much and that has enabled me to spend more time on what’s right or what’s good about someone and see them in a positive light.  It too is working.

Perhaps these two exercises sound somewhat psychological.  Perhaps they are, but it’s really not the way I approach it.  I try to approach it from a more spiritual perspective.  I focus on the spiritual man, the spiritual activity, the God-made individuality of the person in question and stop questioning.  I focus on the positive endeavor of activity and meet the difficulties with creative juices flowing and seeing the good in all activity, in every person – and then expecting only good results.

And you know what?  For the past 10 days as I’ve been concentrating on this, trying to stay with this idea moment to moment 24/7, I’ve watched endeavor to endeavor, person to person evolve into positive results.  Sounds simple and the amazing thing about it is that it IS simple.  Oh I’ve had a few setbacks, but even the setbacks don’t set me back for long if I stay positive.

It comes right down to that old Mama-taught “think positively” lesson.  But maybe that’s why she taught it!  It works.

So I’m approaching life more positively – I’m more positive about life and it’s working.  Life is actually working better!  Things evolve more easily and tend to fall into place or work out smoothly.  Makes sense…

We do create our own experience after all.  We are not at the result of the world and its troubles.  We can take charge of our life by controlling our thinking and staying positive – even in the light of tragedy.  Be here now.  Breath to breath, moment to moment – go forward.  Linger not in the negative, the past.  Go forth expectant joyful.  We’re alive.  So love life.  Love the opportunity to live.  That’s what being grateful is.

The opposite of depression is gratitude.  Find yourself depressed?  Count your blessings!  Best way I know to turn away the doldrums.

All of this comes from the simple effort to love more – people, things, activities.

But then I get to the big one:  Love God more.  My first thought was, “How can I love God more if I’m still trying to figure out what God is?”  I have a lifetime of ‘God’ definitions at my fingertips, yet still can’t seem to get my arms (or my mind) around this magnificent concept.

I wake up in the morning and think to myself, “Well, let’s see, now I’m going to try to love God.”  And nothing happens.  I feel loving, I reach down into my love storeroom and grab up an armful, but then I get stuck.  I just don’t know where to put it.

If I decide to love The Missus more, I either go find her and do it or if she’s not home, I just envision her and love the vision.  It’s easy because I live ‘in love’ with her, and in that experience, love is an immediate presence.  It is right here moment-to-moment and so easily accessible – even when we squabble.  She’s so easy to forgive because we live ‘in love’.

But God, for me, is different.  I can’t go find Him, or It and when I try to envision, nothing comes up.  Or perhaps I should say ‘no thing’ comes up.  I’ve spent a lifetime trying to drop that Guy In The Sky concept from my thinking, so I’m not going to replace it with some other materialistic icon.

No, what I’m moving towards is loving God more by loving Idea more, or to put it more succinctly, loving God’s ideas more.

I can’t wrap my brain around God.  It’s just too big an idea for my tiny gray matter.  I can’t wrap my mind around God.  It’s just too huge a concept.  I can’t get my arms around God.  Whenever I try, there’s nothing there.

But I can become more conscious of God’s idea in a given circumstance.  After all, isn’t that what the previous two pages are all about?  Becoming more conscious of the right idea moment to moment in the given circumstance with the given people or activity.

And you know, when ya’ think about it, what’s the point of trying to love God, the Thing, more anyway?  I don’t think He or It even cares.  After all, as the Bible says, “God is love.”  GOD IS LOVE.  So when we love, we simply reflect God; we reflect love.

When I love life, then I’m loving God.  When I love wife, then I’m loving God.  When I love activity – writing music, orchestrating, writing this post, thinking deeply, creating, figuring it out, solving problems, triumphing, healing, helping others, and on and on – I’m loving God.  I don’t have to know what God is; I just need to recognize His activity, his idea.

I don’t have to pull love up from some storeroom and place it on some Thing because the nature of love is that when we love, it just pours forth.  We can’t even stop it.  It’s the one thing in life that is impossible to slow – it’s that overwhelming.  That’s the nature of love.  It overwhelms us.  It overwhelms us because love is God and God is love.  I accept that God is capable of overwhelming me.  In fact, I invite it!  Any time God wants to overwhelm me, well Sir, just bring it on.  I’m up for that!

So if God is love (and that makes all the sense in the world to me) then I shall let love overwhelm me as well.

Trouble is, as humans, we sometimes mistakenly think that love hurts – that we’ve been hurt by love in the past, so we don’t quite trust it the way we trust the Almighty.  But love is the Almighty.  It is above all words, above all concepts.  It is, above all, what each of us seek.  Yes we seek truth, yes we seek a higher mind, but love is the ultimate quest.  Those who seek money, fall.  Those who seek success, fail.  But those who seek love, love.

For the time being, I’m not going to worry about loving God.  I think I’ll just love more.  That should take care of everything.

Thanks for listening.