Love is never wasted says Offaly influencer

"Loving and Losing" - we love and we lose - this is an integral part of life's unending circle. Throughout the lifecycle, we are confronted continually with experiences of loss and separation.

The loss of a loved one through separation, divorce, or death is one of the most difficult experiences to be dealt with in a lifetime. Losing someone you love is the hardest thing in the world as I know myself along with my family to deal with. It's a kind of pain that you physically feel all over your body. It's suffering of the worst kind. To make things even worse, it seems like no one else understands how you're feeling. In the first few weeks and months people gather round, cry with you, listen to your stories, bring over food, check in on you often and help with all those little things you canʼt bring yourself to think about. But after a few months the crowd thins out.

People seem to go back to their normal lives and expect that youʼll do the same. You get your first real taste of being alone in grief. Over the first year you gear yourself up and survive the first birthday, anniversary and holidays since your loved one died. Then the real, true suffering begins. You realize that you have to keep doing it. Surviving the first anniversary of all those events was only the beginning and you somehow have to keep going.

Thatʼs why no one can tell you how to deal with your grief. Donʼt let anyone tell you when itʼs time to get rid of your loved one's things, or when itʼs time to stop crying or visit the graveyard. You have to figure out for yourself, when you're ready to make changes. Your grief belongs to you. Every time you cry for your loved one, it's a way of honouring who they are in your life and what you have lost. It lets the world know someone really precious has left us and that they still matter. It lets us all know that love is never wasted.

Loving and Losing

"Loving and Losing", different only by one letter but by a million degrees of pain. Yes you can lose someone you love more than words can describe in the blink of an eye and the beat of a heart, life has shown our family how true this is in the most harrowing and heartbreaking way when my beautiful niece Aoifé was taken from us, and the million degrees and more of pain that comes with it which I can’t put into words. Yes your whole life can be turned upside down, your hopes, dreams and future all shattered and crushed into tiny pieces beyond repair.

Life will break you and it can demolish you too if you let it. But you have to Love, you have to feel Love, it’s the reason we are here. We were created to love and to be loved, and I think we all agree that love is the best and most indescribable feeling in the world. Love is never wasted. We all came from Love, I came from Love and my niece Aoifé definitely for sure came from Love.

Love comes from our hearts, but pain is the price of Love which we agree to pay when we open our hearts. Every hello comes with the knowledge that one day there will be a goodbye, every kiss and hug comes with a certainty that one day it will be the last. But even knowing this we will still pay the price and risk it all to Love and to be Loved. We pay it again and again, we’d pay it over and over again, my family will continue to pay it, we pay it and take the risk as we know it makes life worth living and we truly know that our love is never wasted. We pay it because of love, because of family, because of friends, because of neighbours and because of colleagues. Love is always worth it. So Love a little, Love a little more and Love too much, take that risk not because there is nothing to lose, but because everything can always be Lost except Love. Love outlives us all, take the risk, for love is never wasted.

Face of Tragedy

God never promised us that we would not suffer. Those words struck a painful, but truthful chord in me when my niece Aoife tragically passed away suddenly. We as a family stood there witnessing the sudden unexplainable pain one instinctively feels no one should ever have to endure, if our God is a loving God and if, in fact, our God is Love. And yet the reality is that Jesus does not teach us that we will not suffer. The opposite is true. Love leads to suffering. We are encouraged to love without attachment, without desire, without trying to hold on to what or who we love. Life teaches that to love is to suffer and to suffer for and with others, exemplified in the crucified Christ who stretched out his arms on the cross and died for love.

God's response to our suffering is to suffer with us on the cross and to resurrect that suffering into new life. Still, knowing all of that, I could not be anything but devastated by the untimely death of my beautiful niece. How could I trust God in the face of such a tragedy? I had not fully realized, prior to that point, that my idea of God was a God who fixed things, who would make things turn out alright in the end. That image of God, I discovered, is the God of the privileged, the God of those who have not suffered. I find since then, when I talk to people, there is a divide in how people know God between those who have suffered great tragedy and those who have not.

When experiencing pain engendered by love, whether that be grief in death, betrayal, or rejection, the desire to hide is appealing. We feel desperately that we need to build fortified walls to protect us from being that hurt again. We say that we will put up “boundaries” to protect our hearts from unhealthy love, but quickly those boundaries become walls of stone with gates of steel. And we do it all because, in our hearts we feel that our love was wasted.  To love is to be vulnerable. God as love does not promise that we will not suffer. God promises us that when we do suffer, we are held in love and he envelopes us with his arms hugging us from the cross. God does not promise to fix what is broken; God promises to be present in the midst of the brokenness. God envelopes us with his unconditional caring love

Source of Love

That source of love we call God is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, the word of love among us, and in the Holy Spirit, God as love enacted within us and among us. The only antidote to the brokenness of the world is to surrender to love, to let that love act in us and through us, even when we know it may ultimately lead to heartbreak. Love and trust in a finite world are doomed to disappointment. Beyond the inevitable experience of death, our lives are also littered with broken promises, betrayals, people in their humanness letting us down time and again, or perhaps our own humanness and brokenness leading us to sabotage our relationships.

We experience this human brokenness in our lovers, our families, our neighbours, our friends and our colleagues. We must try with all our might to go on Loving. Humans cannot exist without love. God created us to be in a relationship to love and has taught us through prayer to perceive life with the eye of the soul and that we are hardwired for love. So when we read in Scripture that perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18), there is a truth to that statement on a physical as well as spiritual level. Love indeed does drive out fear. We continue to love because we must, if we are going to be human. My relationship with God is now changed, but the relationship endures.

I don't expect God to "fix" things anymore. The miracle for which I now pray is not to have the outcome of the story changed, but rather how I might manifest God's love in the midst of the grief and suffering of the world. My relationship to God as Love is manifested in my ability to love others, to love my family, friends, neighbors, colleagues and those most in need as I love myself. God as source and ground of our love enables us to continue taking the risk to love, even when we have been devastated by love in the past.

Thought for the Week

As your thought for the week, remember that great love at times requires great risk but try as much as you can to take the risk to love again and again to love other human beings, despite their tendency to disappoint and to die, and to love God who has enabled us to love by first loving us. God’s love is never wasted because it is an expression of his perfect character.

When we love, we participate with God and reflect his love. St. John says “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” Real love that requires courage and faith is never wasted. The act of loving proclaims the truest thing in the universe: that God is love. Love is the truth that pulses at the heart of reality. It is the lifeblood of every good thing. It does not matter if love is requited, rejected or abandoned; the true meaning of love stems from the God who is love. But, sometimes we do not feel that deep meaning as we struggle with grief, guilt, and pain. But we must remember that even in petty and small attempts at love, we allow our hearts to be shaped by love. Though our love may seem not to touch the other person, it shapes us. Love leaves a mark, and sometimes it leaves scars.

The greatest love of all bears scars. In Jesus’ resurrected body, he bears the scars of his unconditional love for us all. In those scars I find forgiveness that fills the cracks of my broken attempts at love, and I find solace in a God who knows what it is to be spurned. And so, though my soul wrestles many nights with loving and losing, especially about loved ones gone before me, I have come to believe that It truly is better to love and lose than never to love at all. Love shapes my soul to reach out in grace, care, prayer, empathy, forgiveness, and tenderness. Love draws me closer to the God of unrequited love. Love rebels against the hatred so natural to me at times and to the world. Love invites me into the love story of God. Love is never wasted.