Ignoring Love

How do you love someone?

Most of the self-help websites and books and podcasts and videos all start with the same idea: get to know them first. The problem is that we think we are getting to know a person, when in reality, we are not getting any closer to the real person at all.

We start with what’s on the surface. We start by seeing what they want us to see. Our Instagram accounts are all perfectly tailored to the type of people we know our audiences to be. Our twitter handles only let out our golden jokes or greatest pet peeve’s. Our Facebook feed contains our favorite pictures, our favorite memes, our favorite things. More often than not, the surface is all the stuff you would want someone to know about you.

We all know it’s not real.

Yet we start here with the, “getting to know a person” stage of any relationship.

However, once we look at these baseline things, we make a snap judgment over if we should consider communicating further with this person or not. We decide that we are their friend based solely off of their likes and dislikes, their religious and political affiliations, their absence or presence on certain social media platforms.

That is not growing in love of a person.

That is just confirming the love of oneself.

So how do we get to know someone? How do we actually see the real person and love them?

Let’s start with the purest form of love, the simplest form of a relationship, one that can’t be created through following or friending someone on the Internet.

A new-born baby.

I’ll never forget the day my siblings and I gathered around my little sister Penelope. She is the youngest sibling, and she was born in Nashville just a few months after our move. I had been trying to make a connection to my new home over and over, but nothing seemed to really fit. Mass was nice, but I wasn’t a Daily Mass go-er yet. I was grasping at straws to find something I could share in my new home.

Of course I had my family. I am not discrediting their importance in this new location. However, we were all trying to adjust to our new home. We all needed to help one another. It was good, but it was still difficult.

Then Penelope was born.

Penelope had nothing to give. She could not form an opinion on the best Disney Princess. She could not be a dog person or a cat person. She could not tell me what music she liked, let alone talk to me at all. Penelope was helpless, small, and sweet. There was no telling what she could become.

And yet, Penelope gave all she had, what all of us have from the moment we are conceived.

Love.

Babies appear to have nothing to give. However, because they cannot be judged by what the world makes them out to be, they can only be themselves, which is not a whole lot at first. They don’t know who they are. They know physical pain. They know hunger. They know the basic parts of life.

But they do not know hate.

All they have is love, and that is all they can give.

This ability to love and be loved is part of every human being. So often we look at the labels, the ideas, the opinions of others and decide that these things make it impossible for them to love us. We think that it makes it impossible to love them. However, every single person was born with nothing to give but love.

When we give love, we give joy and purpose and peace. I will never forget the smiles and happy tears in the room where Penelope met Team Newton for the first time. We had been waiting for her for nine months, and now she was finally there. The family was even more complete.

Maybe we should start treating others like we were waiting for them too.

Maybe we should start talking to people like they have nothing to give except love.

We all want to be loved. Even if we are blessed with joyful and love-filled lives, we always are in need of love. Until we reach the source of love, there will never be enough love on this Earth. Therefore, when we encounter another human being, we have the opportunity to love and be loved like we always wanted.

There are so many tragedies going on right now. I think it’s because we’ve lost sight of what love truly is.

Love is recognizing the dignity of the human person and promoting the welfare of that person. 

It does not often give us anything in return, but rather it serves an even greater purpose. Love is exponential. This indescribable gift goes out of ourselves and transforms more lives than we can ever predict. These lives then go out in love to all of the other people they encounter. In time, the love comes back to us. The love does not look the same, but we know in our hearts that this love came back to us, not because of our love, but because we are worthy of love.

We live in a world where lives are considered waste. We disregard the fact that each life is important and can do anything. We disregard the fact that each human being is molded by the world they are a part of, and we disregard the fact that every single person we turn away has no more love to give than they had before.

We are ignoring love because we want something for ourselves. We ignore people because the surface level of getting to know someone is based off of our own desires.

A person is more than their profile. A person is more than what people say about them. A person is infinite and worthy of love.

It’s not just the guns that are taking away our safety. It’s not just the abortions that are causing our problems. It’s not just the wars that are making religions intolerable. It’s not just sexuality that is making us feel lonely. It’s not just walls that are tearing us apart.

It’s this one simple fact:

We are ignoring love.

Until we are willing to accept that every life has value, more value than what it appears to have at the current moment, we will never be able to stop the bleeding. Until we let people live as they were made to live, we will never know what good can come from these souls.

A baby has nothing to give but love.

But love is what the world needs.

I can’t say that this world is perfect, or even completely safe for that matter. What I can say is that we have to stop living for ourselves. We need to start looking at people like we look at a newborn baby. Not with patronizing and childish faces, but with hope for the future. We were all born with unconditional love, and that is not something we can lose.

How do you love someone?

Believe. 

Believe that every person has potential for greatness. No matter how old they are. No matter how much money they have in the bank. No matter their race. No matter their gender identity. No matter how much time is left until they are born or how much time is left until they die. 

No matter what it is that you think is worth avoiding love for…stop and believe in that person.

Because love should not be ignored.