Practical Love

Husbands, wives, dads, moms, girlfriends, boyfriends...you all have a role. When you are in a relationship with someone, you have a commitment and a responsibility to them. This is what we all hope for, long for in life. You want someone to share in your life and to be there for you, but you also long to be there for them as well. Love is a funny thing.  I think that most people will say that they love their wives, husbands, etc., but love is not enough. It is not enough to say, "I love you." Although, that is very important. It is not enough that you pay for everything or that you clean up the house or that you take care of shuttling the kids around. It is not enough that you fix the oven or the washer or put gas in the car. Even if you sacrifice your own dreams to accommodate your family, it is nothing if you don't take care of yourself. In the simplest terms, your love to your spouse is a gift to them. They don't earn your love. It is not capital. It is a gif

  After my Dad had his first stroke, he came home a different man . It was very scary in the hospital. I know my Mom was wondering if she was going to be taking home the equivalent of a baby when this was all done. Her sister, my aunt, was taking care of her husband after a stroke and he was wheelchair bound and very hard to understand. Was this going to be her life too? But he didn't turn out that way. He could walk and talk and lead a very normal life. What happened next was surprising. He started to become effusive. He kept complimenting my Mom and telling her he loved her. He really started to do that with everyone. Now you might think that this was because of a near death experience and he was feeling lucky. It might have been. You hear that happens with a lot of NDEs. I just finished watching an episode of "Castle" on ABC. The show was centered around the premise that the main character had gone to an alternate reality where his girlfriend didn't know hi

I had an observation today. After all this blog is about observing Love in the world and reporting it so we can practice it. You can disagree, as I have stated in the last post, I am no expert on Love. But, with practice, we can all be better at it. My observation is this: All people want to feel beautiful, loved and young. All marketing seems to point to these three pillars. Some people equate beauty with youth but they are far from being the same. Why is it that if a hundred people tell us that we are beautiful and one person tells us we are ugly that we believe the one and not the hundred? I have taken a number of arts and humanities classes and learned the same thing from every class. There is no ugly. God made all things. God knows no ugly. Everything is formed out of Love because God is Love. In the same vane, an artist creates art and that art is created out of love even if it is an expression of angst. I don't want to get into a discussion about art except to say tha

I guess it has been a long time since I wrote in this blog. I guess it is because I don't find myself an expert in this arena. I never set out to be an expert, but reading my posts, I found that I was giving more advice than observation. Love is not something you can be an expert in, but some are better than others. I also find that I have more loving intentions sometimes than loving practice. Practical Love is about the every day practice of love. We are only taught by example how to love. I find the words of experts, the bible and other sources to be confusing at times. I think we can ponder the words and what they mean for so long that we can make them mean whatever we want. "Turn the other cheek..." Matthew 5:39, for example, is not the advice that I necessarily want to give my 13 year old when dealing with bullies in middle school. Learning and teaching Love is a challenge. Practicing Love every day is like a battle of wills within yourself. How do we stand up

When you fall in love, you have the ability to filter out all the bad traits and actions about the person and only see the good. Love paints its own picture. It is a combination of reality, attraction, and what you want to see. Oh, our friends and family see the whole reality, but we seldom do. But Love changes our eyes and we see things differently. Things may not be changed but they are to us. That is not reality, it is our reality. But there is no other kind of reality but our own, because that is how we record things in our own mind. When you are duped or dumped or cheated on by the person we love, that perspective changes in an instant. Over the next minutes, hours, days, weeks, months that person we saw through Love's eyes changes. It gets flipped. The mind only remembers all the bad things and probably as a defense mechanism, they turn ugly. You see, consciously or unconsciously, we choose to love. Falling in love is an expression that we use to describe it, because i

There are no less than 32 reality TV shows about weddings. "Four Weddings" is the marriage competition where 4 couples compete for the best wedding on national TV. Then there is "Bridezilla" where we get to make fun of the nightmare bride. But lets not forget about "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" where we get to watch as people compete to win a bride or a husband. It makes the fight to save marriage from the Gays seem a little ridiculous. It also makes you wonder what they are fighting for. Does marriage equality mean they are getting an opportunity to be exploited on TV or to be divorced? The conventional wisdom and research seems to point to 40-50% of first marriages and 60% of second marriages end in divorce. Although I am skeptical of the research and statistics on that one, I certainly know a lot of people who have divorced. In my immediate family, the statistic is 30%. I don't exactly want to get into the reasons for divorce,