“Lord, I love you. I love you because you first loved me. I wouldn’t even think to love, to know you, had you not originated it,” I say as I take a moment to spend with my Lord God. I am aware that sometimes I just don’t appreciate him and his love enough. I fall short in the gratitude department.

“You make me smile,” he responds. “You still think that loving, giving, knowing, . . . that everything you do, are episodic events.  That you take a moment to love, to spend time with me . . . when in reality, you are with me all the time. Your love is constant in the universe. It doesn’t start and stop.  It’s only your conscious awareness that starts and stops it.”

“Sounds like then I’m loving even when I don’t know it.  It just exudes from me,” I say, feeling rather proud of my ever-loving, little self. But then the opposite occurs to me as well.  “And then maybe I’m hating even when I don’t know it.”  That does not evoke pride from me.  It brings confusion.  Then how do I know what I’m sending out? Is there a switch I flip one way or the other? Is it according to my conscious thought?  What’s the deal, I wonder.

“It comes from the core of your being,” the Lord says to me. “It comes from what you identify with, not from your actions, not even from your thinking.  It’s deeper than that. What you do adds to it, strengthens it or weakens it, but it is from a deeper place than you have known within yourself.  Love comes from intimacy with me within you.”

I instantly recognize that as truth.  I don’t know what it means, how to rationalize it or figure it out, but I know it’s true. It resonates within me, in my spirit.

“Lord, I perceive it as something to let seep into my soul, to simply receive it and let it be. I don’t need to understand the mechanics of it.”

“Yes. Don’t labor over it.  Let it permeate you, and you will know more fully.  That knowing will by-pass your mind and your thinking, and you will come to understand what it is to be love.  Then being love, you will give it without thought, without restraint, without works, without trying. It will be in you and come from you even as it is with me.”

Now it’s my turn to smile. “Yes, Lord. I am as you are.  Love.”