Love is All You Need

Corinthians 13:13 –

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

 The Beatles once sang that “Love is all you need.” They almost had it right. It should have been, “Love is All”. Love is the only thing you can take with you. Love is the only thing that each and every normal individual craves. Without love we experience a void that we try to fill in other ways, but none of them satisfy the way love does. Nothing else comes close to filling that void. Love is All. A simple statement for sure. But what do I mean by it? You know when I was a very young man, I used to contemplate all the great mysteries of life. I would sit outside on a hot summer night and look up at the stars letting my imagination run wild. My brother and I used to argue about what was on the other side of the end of space. Infinity was something neither of us could get our heads around. My brother argued that the universe had to have a boundary. We had heard a little about the so-called Big Bang Theory. According to this theory, space itself is expanding like a toy balloon at a kid’s birthday party. I never accepted that theory as a kid. “If it has borders that were expanding, what was on the other side of those borders,” I would ask. There had to be something right? What was the universe expanding into? “Nothing”, my brother assured me. There was nothing on the other side of the border. “Well, how far does this nothing go,” I asked? “It just goes on forever,” he said. I thought that this nothing had to be pretty darn big then. It must be way bigger than the universe that was by definition everything. Then I imagined that if I could go far enough above it all and look at this infinity of nothing, I might spot the universe in the midst of it like a tiny grain of sand in an endless ocean. From that perspective, the universe wasn’t so big after all.

  That was the humble beginning of my endeavors to understand the cosmos. I first read about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in high school, and my mind really got itself in gear trying to figure the whole thing out. Einstein set me on a path of exploration that has taken me in so many different directions at once. I’m still not so sure Einstein was right about everything he proposed. But one of the concepts that fascinated me was his attempts to reconcile what he called the “weak” and “strong” forces of gravity which, he thought, if he could just manage that, he would have his Holy Grail of a unified theory of everything. I started thinking a lot about gravity then too. At the same time I was contemplating all the great scientific mysteries, I was also wrestling with the religious ones as well. I remember the first time I came across the statement, “God is Love.”  My family weren’t church goers. I wasn’t indoctrinated in anyone’s belief system as a child. I pretty much came up with my own beliefs. For starters, I never doubted that there was a God who created the universe even though no one had assured me at this point that there was indeed a creator of everything. All of nature’s intricate patterns, designs, laws were God’s handiwork, no doubt, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t know what to think about the rest of religious dogma, but that much I was certain about.

  Somehow, while pondering all these things, I had a flash of insight that told me that God’s Love and the mysterious force of gravity might be one and the same thing. Don’t ask me how. But here’s how it appeared to me - there’s this mysterious, invisible, unexplainable force that emanates from the center of Earth pulling me and everything else towards the center, right? And this force has nothing to do with electric fields or magnetic lines or electro-magnetism as it were. Then what is gravity and what generates it – where does it come from? And how does such a force pull on me in just such a manner as not to ever crush me or allow me to go floating off into space? I began to imagine God’s love as this force that fills his creation. His love holds me to the ground of this ball of matter we call planet Earth that is spinning so very frighteningly fast around its own axis and at the same time making a hasty orbit around the sun and simultaneously going on a tear around the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy not to mention the presumably incredible journey into that void of nothingness my brother and I used to contemplate. With so much tremendous motion involved, still I’m held gently but firmly to the surface of the world. And they call that the “weak” force of gravity! They call it weak because you can defy it and escape it leaving the Earth’s surface behind. Yes if you push hard enough, God will let you slip from his grasp. But don’t worry – whether you believe in him or not – God loves all his children and won’t turn you loose and let you drift away unless you make a very concerted effort to do so. I for one have a feeling that if I was a proportional size standing on the surface of a nucleus of an atom and I pushed with a proportional effort against my restraints, God would loosen his grip just the same and I would leave that atom to go floating off into the nearly infinitely empty space that exist between the atoms. God’s love is a powerful thing. But he will never use it to make you submit to his will against your own. He will never crush you with it. But he will release you from it if you push against it. But therein lies the void. Without God’s love we are empty pitiful things. Yes, I know if I were able to stand on the surface of say Jupiter, I would be crushed down flat by the tremendous force of gravity there. But that’s because I’m not of the right proportion to stand freely on such a surface.

  Love between two people is a powerful thing as well. It pulls them together and makes them one. The love between a man and a woman or the love between a parent and their children can be oh so fulfilling and such a blessed thing. I love my children always - no matter what and whether they believe it or not. I have been lucky enough to have loved a couple of women with all my heart and soul. But I lost each of them in their turn. And after suffering such a great loss, some of that emptiness again plagued my soul. Since then, that void has been filled with a different love. The love of God. I have a new woman in my life that makes me happy and fills that need again that we all share for human companionship. Now, however, I take great comfort in knowing that I will never experience that feeling of a great empty void again. God’s love will always be there filling that hole and keeping me grounded.

  So which would you prefer to imagine pulls you towards the center of the Earth – an invisible, unexplained force – or God’s love? You can call it the “weak” force of gravity if you want to. But as for me, I prefer to think of it as God’s Strong Love for all his children that keeps our feet planted firmly on the ground. 

Think we know what gravity really is? Go to this link and think again:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question232.htm

                                                      I've Been Away Now For So Long...
  My, it's been a while. Sometimes, when you live on a fixed income as I do now with only Social Security benefits to pay the bills and buy the groceries, it can be difilcult to get two ends to meet. I've been drawing Social Security now since I was 62 years old (I'll be 66 next month). I didn't really want to retire at 62 but my job played out a couple months before I turned 62 and I couldn't find another one at the time, so I figured I might as well. At least I would have social security money coming in. However, to this day I still haven't figured out a way to budget my monthly income so that it will last the whole month. Getting only one meager check a month really sucks.
   Anyway, recently my now aged car (2003 Ford Escape) has decided to go all rust bucket on me and keeps trying to give up the ghost. I had to spend $800 last month just to keep it running sufficiently enough to get me from point A to point B (as long as point A is not too far from point B) with only a minimum of anxiety about being stranded on the side of the road. That hit, on an already strained budget, left me scrambling to figure out whether it would be Paul or Peter who got paid that month. The cable bill was one of the Paul's that didn't get paid. I discovered very quickly that Time Warner doesn't have much of a sense of humor about such things. They cut me off only a few days after the bill was overdue. So no TV and no Internet.
  Now let me tell you it was a close call. I almost decided I could live without food as long as I had the internet. I had to pay the electric bill of course because it is pretty cold out there and hard to read books in the dark. Tough choices had to be made. Of course my addiction to food won out in the end and keeping the lights on just barely. So it's been a couple of long months with no TV and no Intenet. I say again...no TV and no Internet! For me that shock was like the shock to most of you if someone came and took away your cell phone. Heaven forbid! How would you live? Well, I'm here to report on just how I managed to live out these past few months without curling up in the corner of my room and turning into a  little shrivelling, brown ball of withdrawal twitches accompanied by pitiful moans and groans that would have been horrible to witness.
  I actually survived quite well. I didn't starve, and I read a few books I've been meaning to read. I played a lot of games on my computer...yes it still works without the internet - but just barely. It even kept popping up a little message in the bottom right corner saying there were new updates available for me to download. Poor computer was delusional thinking it still had access to the outside world. And I hate to admit it, but I did click on the message a couple of times just to see what would happen. Nothing...well it told me to please check my internet connection because it could not connect to the internet. Just goes to show you how smart these things really are.
  Now for some of you, I'm sure, losing the TV would be a major blow. I mean how would you know who they kicked off the island on Survivor, or who got voted off of American Idol? Or others would just die if they didn't know for sure if Victor was really going to be that mean to his own son, Nick. For me, I wouldn't know those things even if I had TV. Now I really thought I might die for sure when I thought about not seeing any of the final season football games and none of the College Bowl games. But low and behold I put them out of my mind and life went on. To tell the truth, I'm not a big TV fan. I do watch a lot of movies, but that is about it. The past couple of months, I did watch several of the dvd's in my collection for the umpteenth time. I couldn't even afford Red Box and that's just sad. So old favorites had to suffice when times got tough.
  But it was the internet that was as hard for me to do without as it was for me to give up drinking Coca Colas a few years back. I craved me some internet. I was recently told by someone that they had never met a man that didn't watch the News on TV on a daily basis. I never watch the news on TV. But I read a lot of news on the internet...real news and not just what some talking head wants to convince me is the real "no spin" version of the news. I subscribe to and read a lot of newsletters that come in my email on a daily basis. I had well over 1,000 unread emails, by the way when I did finally get on the internet. I also watch a lot of videos on youtube, and actually scroll down and see what all you guys posted on my facebook page. I also depend on the internet guite a bit as a research tool. I use it to look up details I include in my book I'm writing. I also use it for reasearch and commentaries when preparing for my weekly Bible Study class. So for me the internet is the to-die-for utility around here. I could do without my TV, cell phone, coffee maker, microwave, or blender way better than doing without my internet access. That being said...I still survived without it just like we deed in the old days. In fact I really started getting used to the peace and quiet around here. But I'm from the now older generation and still remember how it was in the old days when we didn't have such things as TV's, Computers, and cell phones busying up our time and drowning out our own thoughts. For the last couple of months I got a little taste of what that used to be like. And it wasn't at all as bad as I thought it might be. Still don't look for me to throw my computer out the window any time soon, ok?
Not gonna happen. And Yea!!!! I have internet again!