Tag: generosity

Keeping score or giving 100%?

Published on by lindseybiggs2 Comments

“It’s not about power; it’s about love.”

This is a beautiful statement that I heard last night.

I was sharing with some friends that my husband often gets up with me when I can’t sleep and will make pancakes for me, watch a movie with me or pray for me.

One of our friends was being cheeky and asked him, “how long do you think this power over you will last?” My husband replied, “it’s not about power; it’s about love.”

Beautiful! He summed up the impetus behind our family’s motives and actions much better than I could.

Often we think about relationships in terms of keeping score – making sure we are doing an equal amount of loving acts, favors and signs of affection for one another.

However, there is a more spiritual way to look at things.

Early on in our marriage, my husband and I were given the gift of attending a seminar called “Celebrate marriage!” (we had only been married a couple of weeks at this time). The speaker shared many valuable things; one idea that has stuck with me is that marriage isn’t about each person giving 50%. Marriage is about each person giving 100%. When each person in a marriage gives 100% all the time, there is no withholding of love or affection. Each person is looking for opportunities to give all the time.

Wow, what a revolutionary and spiritual view of relationships! It really symbolizes our relationship to God, who is always pouring out more love than we could ever accept! God’s love is unconditional (this is illustrated in Christ Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, for instance). And God doesn’t keep score – thankfully! 🙂

So, if we are made in God’s image and likeness that means we are capable of loving unselfishly – the way God loves. We can pour out love to the people around us – taking every opportunity to give and not worry about what we might get in return.

This seems like a tall order, but it’s nothing more than a mental discipline – not giving in to fears about lack, limits or the future that would prevent us from being as generous and as loving as we can be this moment.

Christian healer and teacher, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote:

“Human affection is not poured forth vainly, even though it meet no return. Love enriches the nature, enlarging, purifying, and elevating it.” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 57)

And she asks these pointed questions:

“God is Love. Can we ask Him to be more? God is intelligence. Can we inform the infinite Mind of anything He does not already comprehend? Do we expect to change perfection? Shall we plead for more at the open fount, which is pouring forth more than we accept?” (Ibid, p. 2)

Sometimes we may forget just how big and limitless God is. But maintaining this infinite view of God illustrates just how big and limitless the love is that we have to give to each other. And this love blesses us making us feel fulfilled and joyful.

 

 

 

 

True love

Published on by lindseybiggsLeave a comment


Last night, as I was going to bed, I was praying to know how to “love my neighbor” better. 

The answer that came to me is to love my neighbor (and myself) spiritually. 

“In patient obedience to a patient God, let us labor to dissolve with the universal solvent of Love the adamant of error, — self-will, self-justification, and self-love, — which wars against spirituality and is the law of sin and death.” (Eddy, Science and Health, p. 242)

Self-will (or human wilfulness), self-justification (or feeling the need to justify what you are doing perhaps because it isn’t right) and self-love are actually the opposite of Love, divine, true Love. 

A well-known, and probably the best written statement on Love comes from I Corinthians 13:

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly,but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” (New Revised Standard Version)

I think of this wonderful statement of love as a comparison between self-love (thinking we are the best and indulging our material personality) versus spiritual love, the Love which is God itself. 

We have all felt moved, touched or inspired by Love, I’m sure. Perhaps it was in helping a friend, saying just the right thing that meant so much to someone, or in a healing we had. As we erase the “adamant of error” from our consciousness we become lighter, clearer and a better transparency for divine Love, the love that heals, saves and uplifts.