Love, Tolerance, and Miracles
The words for the year I landed on for 2025 have already offered me plenty of spiritual sustenance, food for thought, and emotional insights. If I keep an open mind and heart, I suspect more of these benefits will flow.
Love is . . . hard to define, less hard to recognize when you feel it and see it. Love is gentle kindness to others and ourselves and a fierce courage in the face of suffering and challenges. Love is compassion and forgiveness. Love has many forms and levels. I am blessed with the loving support of family and friends and a patient and gracious Higher Power.
Love is limitless, and like gratitude, when we share it, it grows. You and I can send love out to the wider world and all who live in it. It doesn’t hurt us and it could help others. Hate, resentment, and fear do hurt us. They make us spiritually sick and contaminate the positive stream of life rather than contribute to it.
Tolerance does not mean agreement or silence. It means saving the energy that would go to anger, fear, worry, and frustration. It means accepting what I can’t change–other people, places and things-and working on what I can change–my own words, actions, and thoughts.
Tolerance starts with me and my own human shortcomings. When I see my own imperfections with loving eyes and heart, I see yours with more tenderness too. Love then guides and strengthens us when we need to speak up, stand up, get up and take action.
Miracles abound when I pause and pay even a little attention. The miracle of waking up, opening my eyes and seeing. The miracle of turning on a light switch and illuminating a room. The miracle of a flower blooming in the winter. I think we sell Creation and ourselves short when we confine miracles to only certain and significant happenings and beings. Miracles abound when I pause and pay even a little attention.
Like the little miracles created a dot at a time on this coaster made by my friend Liz. A dot at a time, a day at a time, colors and insights emerge, the design of our lives takes fuller shape. Thank you Liz. Thank you Creation, Thank you Love. Onward!
