FREEDOM TO SHINE YOUR LIGHT BY LOVING PEOPLE

FREEDOM TO SHINE YOUR LIGHT BY LOVING PEOPLE

“Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself – and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is” - Jim Morrison

Do I have freedom from friends to be my true self?

Freedom to:

1. Forgive someone who hurt me
2. Rest when I am exhausted
3. Experience what brings me joy
4. Remember my past hurts
5. Live for possibility
6. Exude kindness to a stranger
7. Choose a different future
8. Share worries to calm my heart and mind
9. Find hope during times I feel hopeless
10. Simply LOVE people

Freedom can be easy and difficult to define.

Today’s Cara Lucia, Friendly Light post I dedicate to friends who give me total freedom to be my true self. Above The above list short and it initially started with more than 10. I had a list of 20 and started talking to myself…Cara, Cara, Cara let’s stop at 10, geez. Number 10 was actually number 20 initially on my list. As I came upon “Simply Love People,” I came to the realization that my freedom to love people is the most important, my number 1.

Freedom to:

1. Simply love people

Recently in a message at church, my pastor shared with us that if you want to make a difference you must have LOVE (1 Corinthians 13). Many times, we strictly confine LOVE to relationships with partners (for example, 1 Corinthians 13 is shared during many wedding ceremonies, I think at the time I truly didn’t understand the meaning of LOVE, yes, LOVE is kind, LOVE is patient….but at 22 years old I don’t think I truly understood that LOVE should be shared with everyone).

How amazing would our world be if we chose to simply LOVE people (I think about times I may have not chosen to act from a place of LOVE and I lost an opportunity to give someone LOVE – how might a situation turned out differently?).

If someone gives you the freedom to be your true self, that’s LOVE right?

1 Corinthians 13 tells us:

The Way of Love
13 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 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 have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;[b] 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

During the 4th of July celebrations of our freedom I ask you to ponder the following questions:

1. If you want to make a difference, do you need to have LOVE to do it?
2. Consider a time you received LOVE from someone, how will you take the LOVE you received and share it with others?
3. How even during the stormiest of days will you consider LOVE - to be patient, kind, not envious, not boastful, not proud, not self-seeking, not easily angered, rejoice with the truth, protect, always trust, always hope, and always persevere?

I am thankful this 4th of July for all we receive from our friends: the freedom to be our true selves. I thank you all for LOVING me so that I have the ability to share LOVE with others.

I choose to simply LOVE people.