I heard this excerpt from one of Howard Thurman's books today while listening to Your Soul's Evolution by Michael Bernard Beckwith. The timing of the universe is always perfect, as I had just been sharing with someone how difficult it has been to stay centered and in the presence of love, refusing retaliation and childish games while going through this separation from my husband. These words could not have connected with my heart more if I had written them myself.
I want to be more loving in my heart. I want to be more loving. Often there are good and sufficient reasons for exercising what seems a clear direct resentment. Again and again I find it hard to hold in check the sharp retort, the biting comeback, even when it seems that someone has done violence to my self respect and decent regard. How natural it seems to give as good as I get. To take nothing lying down, to announce to all a sundry and a thousand ways that no one can run over me and get away with it. All this is a part of the thicket in which my heart gets caught again and again. But deep within me I want to be more loving. To glow with a warmth that will take the chill off of the room, which I share with those whose lives touch mine in the traffic of my goings and comings. I want to be more loving. I want to be more loving in my heart. It is often easy to have the idea in mind, the plan to be more loving; to see it with my mind and give consent to the thought of being loving. This is crystal clear. But I want to be more loving in my heart. I must feel like loving. I must ease the tension in my heart that ejects the sharp barb, the stinging word. I want to be more loving with unconscious awareness and deliberate intent: Unconscious awareness and deliberate intent. I shall be a kind, a gracious human being. Thus those who walk the way with me may find it easier to love. To be gracious because of the love of God which is increasingly expressed in my living. I want to be more loving in my heart.
~Howard Thurman
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