You are caused by Love
Special holidays such as Valentine’s Day can sometimes elicit a “what about me?” cry in the human heart. Many people don’t feel embraced with companionship and love. And when you’re alone, the special days that advertisers say are meant to be shared can seem empty. The “what about me?” cry seems so legitimate. Surely humanity was meant to live with a sense of companionship and love.
The founder of the Monitor, Mary Baker Eddy, had her share of human heartbreak. Yet in response, she spent much of her adult life working to bring consolation and healing to humanity. She obviously felt that people had a right to the joy and fulfillment they long for. She wrote in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” that happiness “is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it” (p. 57).
People who have not found companionship and love, or who feel they have lost them, might quickly point out that you have to have happiness before you can share it. So how does that happen? How can we feel assured that it’s possible to find or recover companionship and love?
To discover and know that we can be loved, we need to reverse the focus from the feeling that we aren’t receiving love, to giving it to others – even if it’s not returned. That active reversal of focus from emptiness to expressing love, without the “what about me?” thought, will fill the heart with what it longs for.
The night before his betrayal and crucifixion, Jesus told his disciples, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another”
(John 13:34). Jesus commanded his followers to love. He must have recognized that humanity’s native capacity to love does exist – that it has already been caused by God, the source of all being. He also must have known that loving inevitably results in blessing everyone, including the one who initiates the loving. Or he wouldn’t have commanded it.
The fact is, God created you and me. The Bible says, “God is love” (I John 4:8, 16). Mary Baker Eddy employed divine Love as a synonym for God. And He has been practically understood by thousands as Love as they have experienced His healing presence and power to regenerate. So, the ability to obey Jesus’ commandment to love can result only from the reality that we are Love-caused, God-caused, in the first place.
To love is our inherent, original nature – the nature that Jesus commanded his followers to exercise. He knew each of us could obey the commandment because he knew our origin is in Love itself. We are Love-caused brothers and sisters, fully equipped to realize and live our real nature – and to acknowledge it in one another.
Is the cry “What about me?” legitimately answered by following Jesus? Try to love without that inward-looking question and see. Every heart can truly be made whole and satisfied through loving one’s brothers and sisters without thought of self. Heartfelt thinking that leads one to forget self in loving others – the highest good anyone can offer – is always blessed.
You can understand and be blessed by Jesus’ commandment to love, regardless of the day or holiday. You have the capacity to reverse the imprisoning thought that you are not loved and therefore cannot express unselfed love. Reverse it and replace it with the spiritual fact that because you are Love-caused, God-caused, in the first place, you love and are loved. It’s a spiritual law that leads to feeling loved right now, and you can count on it.
