This week, New Year's week, for me, is all about love. No New Year's resolutions that are ultimately results of criticisms and self-loathing. No starting new and tortured personal campaigns for change. No feeling bad about myself. I am going to love myself, love others and love life as fully as possible. Love will guide the way.
I am building on the love from my Creator who I chose to call God, who made me and gives me everything I need and more. I feel the love that He has for His Creation, loving everything that is, into existence. It is God's love that I will return to again and again in meditation and prayer, when I need love, and when I want to give love.
I am feeling the love that my parents had for each other when they conceived me, and the love and care they gave me in birth, raising me, and loving me enough to let me go when it was time. It is that love of my parents, and their parents, from the ages to the ages that gives me love to love my wife and conceive our children in love.
I love myself as much as I can in all my inferiority and flaws, sins and errors, strengths and weaknesses, and my talents and abilities. I am a lover, and I love being alive. Sure, there are changes I want to make, but if I lovingly make them focusing on what's good and possible with love, then by the love and grace of God I will be the best I can be.
I love my family, my brothers and sister, my aunts and uncles, my nieces and nephews, cousins and in-laws. I love them no matter what comes, or how much they may annoy me at times. I still love them. It's that love that keeps us bound as family. Those bonds of family love are infinite and eternal.
Friends may come and go, but it was because I loved them and they me that we became friends in the first place. That love also endures the test of time, and brings me through hard times. My friends remind me I am loved again and again. I would love to be as good a friend as they are to me.
Work, also, is a gift of love. It is my livelihood, fulfills my mission to help others, and allows me the possibility of returning the love that I've received. I love my work, even though it is work, and it is difficult sometimes.
So now it is another New Year, a turning of the page on a calendar, yet again another day that I'm lovingly grateful to be still alive. I love being alive. I love writing you and sharing God's great gift of love.
It is love that will guide me through the day, and God-willing into tomorrow to love again and again, no matter what may come.