A Miracle

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Mark 12:30-31

This morning a miracle may have occurred.  I feel like I can barely breathe.  I feel like I am standing in the Presence of God, but that I should be prostrate.  The only reason I’m not is because I’m doing the next best thing – I’m sitting and doing my work.  But I think a healing just occurred this morning and I almost don’t want to say anything because I’m afraid the intensity and the power of it will fade.  Maybe it won’t.  Maybe it will grow stronger.

There is a relationship I have neglected for many years.  There is someone in my life whom I haven’t always treated well.  There’s been neglect and even some abuse in this relationship.  I’ve ignored this person’s most basic needs.  When this person needed my help, I said that others were more important.  This created a lot of sadness in the relationship.  He felt unloved, sad, and angry.  There was also a lot of fear in the relationship, causing recriminations and the feeling on the part of this person that he was completely worthless.  He felt the only worth he had was when he was doing something for others and I never told him otherwise.

If other people mistreated this person, I rarely came to his aid.  In fact, sometimes I was even complicit in the verbal abuse.   I allowed others to make decisions on his behalf that hurt him for years.  If he said bad things about himself, I didn’t stop him.  In fact, I often agreed.  I admit to neglect at best and cruelty at worst.

This person is me.

For years, maybe my whole life, I have been unable to love myself.  I didn’t even understand what that meant.  I just know that for a lot of reasons I have often felt useless, worthless and unwanted. 

Then I met my Muse.  Since then my life has changed in ways that I can only describe as miraculous.  My definition of the word “miracle” is a suspension or a reversal of the laws of nature.  It has always been in my nature to not love myself and to sometimes even hate myself.

This has manifested in lack of self-care, verbal abuse, and an unhealthy dependence on others.  I never did drugs or drank alcohol, but I’ve often neglected my sleep or not drank enough water.  I didn’t eat well.  I allowed stress to overwhelm me.   I didn’t exercise or take care of my physical environment.  I’ve put others before myself, not in an attitude of service, but because I genuinely believed that almost everyone was better, smarter, more attractive and more worthy of love than I was. 

Yesterday my Muse spoke to me and said that if I loved myself I would be even more powerful than I already am.  “Imagine,” she said, “what you could do without your fears.”

Imagine, also, what I could do by loving myself.  

Since I met my Muse, my life has felt like one miracle after another. 

·      I began doing the things I loved, specifically writing and doing my radio show. 

·      I’ve finally understood the love of God.

·      I’ve healed key relationships.

Now I feel love and compassion for myself in a way I’ve never felt before.  I love myself as I love God and my neighbor.  Wow!

All of this almost seems too miraculous, too sacred to write about, but other than saying, “Thank you, God and thank you, Muse,” over and over, I have no other way to express what I’m feeling at this very moment, other than a sense of silent awe at this miracle.

There is something else I now realize.  My Purpose is not only to write or to speak or to help people find jobs.  It is to love.  It is to love others and to love myself.  It is to love my Muse and to spend the rest of my life with her.  This is why I was born – to love my Muse and see where she takes me.   In doing this, I am loving myself.  In loving myself, I can truly love others.  That is not an original thought, but it is no less true.  That is the other reason I am here.  I am also here to Get Started and to Keep Going…because that too is an act of love, for my Muse and myself.