LyricalWhip

"And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love." I Cor. 13:13

Love is so crazy. It can make us do crazy things and can even lead us to hate. It can drive us crazy, but it can also keep us grounded. Love can lead to both joy and pain, but for that same reason, it's the only thing that makes us human. It gives us courage in spite of our fears and makes us weak in spite of our power. Love blinds us, but gives us supernatural insight into the state of the human condition. Among the many things that I remember about my mother, the one most important thing to her was to love people.


Love is a thankless job and it is rarely a 2-way street. We often send it out and it never comes back. If it does, it's usually not in the form we expect it to be in. Most of us have grown scared of love, either because we're running low, or because it left us hurt in the end. But we must never give up loving each other, or we'll become the very monsters that hurt us in the beginning.


Loving people was so simple and easy when I was a kid. "Can you come out and play? Great-We're friends." "You gave me candy? Great. We're friends." It seems like as I grew older, more things got put in front of it. Too many people kicked me off my bike and took my candy.

Somewhere, love got lost in the abyss of unless's, if's, and's, but's, and except for's. Life made me hard. I think that's why it's so hard to recognize these days. My priorities got flipped somewhere in between. I've mistaken love for lust, infatuation, and loyalty.


My mother wasn't perfect by any means, but she truly made it her mission to love people when she was alive. She offered her home to crack fiends and prostitutes (I learned a LOT those years!). She listened to thankless people bleedleeedlee on and on about their problems. Unlike most people at our church, she went to hoods and projects to win souls. As an evangelist, she LISTENED to lost souls. She just listened.....She gave no advice, but spoke the good news of salvation instead of bondage and condemnation. She liberated more souls by listening instead of preaching (she saved that for ME). She invited people over for dinner all the time. Our house had a revolving door. There were many times I would come downstairs in the morning and I --personally,--would be like, "Who the fuck are you?" hahaha.

When she worked as a collections agent for delinquent accounts, she actually listened to the sad stories of customers explaining why they couldn't make their payments. She empathized with them. She made personal lists of their names and interceded for them before God in her quiet time. I know cause I found those lists in random notepads in her closet after she passed away....my name always had hard lines under it LMAO....

She made her clothes closet a prayer closet! *lmfao and crying* That company received more payments from that category of customers than they ever had before.

She was slow to anger and quick to forgive and apologize. I personally can only remember 4 or 5 times that she actually went Kanye and they were all over her family.


I never really understood why she gave herself away like that--why she loved people that took it for granted; never giving anything back even in her last days, but since she died, I think I get it.


I realized that the only thing that matters in our lifetime is to love people on a sincere level...Because when our life comes to a close, the scratching and clawing to get that big promotion won't matter. The revenge we got on people that hurt us won't matter. The only thing that will matter will be the the lives we changed while we were alive--our legacy. That's something you can never really measure.


I have my share of days, but I'm going to make it a point to remember that every day. Because some days are a hot mess from the moment my feet touch the floor.

This world is so tough sometimes. It screams the anthem "Get Yours". But at the end of the day, when my goals are accomplished and there is nothing left to pursue, love will be the only thing that will be remaining.


Loving people that show me love is easy for me. It's loving the people that choose to piss in my corner that is hard. It's loving people that try to threaten my livelihood in any form or fashion that's hard. It's a tough task, but I know it can be done.