Quantifying Love

Self-worth And Affection

In every relationship you will ever have there will at some point be a sense of bartering between the conscious decision to either love or tolerate the other person. These moments arrive to us through the countless hardships and challenges life brings our way. Some relationships will falter where others will soar. And in those moments we will either decide the value of those relationships by revering their worth or devaluing them within our hearts.

So why do we love others and yet find ourselves in a position where love seems to fail?

For me the question has always been more about why others could ever really love me...

From birth we start out a blank slate. Every idea of what love is and what it will ever mean to us is written upon our souls and upon our flesh from that first breath. Infants who experience love from the womb show that they expect it upon arrival. Their desire to cling to the woman who carried them all those months is evident not only in their helplessness but in their desire for that affection. Separation becomes more agonizing than hunger itself. This is for many the first inclination, despite never registering in our memories, of what love will mean for us.

But what if love was refused to us from those early stages? What if the person we were meant to cling to offered nothing but hatred from the start?

For me that came from my father. One of the few people I came into this world seemingly believing was supposed to offer me love and comfort and yet what I received was absolute abhorrence. Where gentle words could had soothed the pain inflicted by his own hand, I was guided toward a view of myself that lingers to this day.

Life isn't fair.

The fairy tales better fathers would had offered didn't happen for me. The happy ever after was hidden beneath bruises and scars that time itself dared not heal. What view I was given of myself was that of worthlessness and helplessness. Through hedonistic barbarism I was given a standard against which I was to judge myself, and all because at that age I couldn't had known it was wrong.

For others this standard against which we measure ourselves arrives to us in much the same way. Through it may not had been through that exact method, we obtain a view of ourselves by how those we love reflect it upon us. Their every action, every misspoken word, these are the things that build up a chart in our mind that tells us from that point forward just how worthy of love we really are. It doesn't matter that this standard set for us is flawed... it only matters to us because at that moment it is the only one we have got.

Moving forward in life becomes like navigating our way through a battlefield. For me it was one long path of trying to make sure other people, no matter how much I loved them, couldn't hurt me like that again. This was often achieved by simply reminding myself that if the one man who should had loved me from the start couldn't... nobody else ever would.

Over the years this scar claimed relationship after relationship. It's appetite for self-preservation was insatiable. Whenever someone would approach that point that little prick in my side would arise. The scars, the bruises, every drop of blood spilled... All of this came to the surface and the desire to shut down became so pronounced that it could not be denied.

Friends, family; nobody is safe when those defenses come shooting to the surface. The most simple of triggers can cause the walls to rise up so quickly that we assume there was a clean break. Yet on the other side we leave someone dazed and confused as we close our eyes and wish them away.

So what happens when someone doesn't go away?

Within our souls we have measured our own worth. We know what we feel we are worth and how much love we can accept from another. It such a deeply embedded logic, yet so illogically based, that when it is questioned the world seems to near collapse all around us.

When a person decides to push against our walls we become combative. The defenses we cherish are in danger. The attacker is irrational in our view as they somehow cannot see how misguided we believe their advances to be. We see ourselves as the untouchables and yet here is this person trying to reach over our walls and place themselves where only those scars remain.

No matter how guarded we are, no matter how many defenses we have erected, there will be this person who does not allow their love to be so easily refused. They see us in a way that we cannot see ourselves. They look beyond this standard we have for so long compared ourselves to. And in it's place they have drawn a new standard for us that reflects not the scars that have defined us, but rather what we could be... what we should have always been.

If we are lucky, if we can lower our walls just a little, we can feel the warmth of another's love without holding our own hearts in reserve. But for this to happen we must first allow ourselves to release our sense of self worth from the standard someone else has cast for us. We must break our attachment to the pain that has bound us and restricted us. We must allow the love of another to break down our guards and touch the scars we have clung to for so long.

This isn't something that happens over night. The reason for those scars must be addressed and the pain they cause must be released. The wounds that were left upon us by others may never truly heal and the pain may reappear from time to time. But if, and only when, we accept that we are worthy of the love of another... that is when the pain these scars bring can finally be eased. The torment these scars have created can finally be soothed as we allow this love to lift us beyond the prison they have created for us.

"Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other."

Psalm 85:10

My Own Dreams Of My Father

My father has always had a voice that could travel right through the thickest of walls. That low tone could slip through the cracks in those old wood floors no matter how gently he was speaking. Even a groan or sigh as he woke up in the morning would carry right up the stairs and through the door to where I slept. It was one of those timeless things in my memory that no matter how old I get I will never forget. That feeling of waking up and knowing that my dad was still there.

See, the father I grew up wasn't the one I was born with. My biological father, as we learned to refer to him as, discarded me like he did with most everything and anyone. That was a wound that took years to heal. See, the father I grew up with was the one that I heard when I woke up in the morning, the man I heard when I fell asleep at night.

I remember rolling over in bed in the morning and hearing the most beautiful thing in the world. It wasn't the birds outside or the sounds of the world beginning to wake up alongside me. The most beautiful thing I could ever hear was the sound of my father as he woke up the world, my world. Because every morning I would roll over and hear him as he got up and did the most wonderful thing a father could do...

My mornings began with listening in on my father's prayers. I would listen to him pray for everyone in the world it seemed. Yet I was only awake for one reason. It wasn't the fact that his voice was so strong that I could imagine it rattling the windows and shaking the floor itself. No, I was waiting. I was waiting to hear my father's voice as he prayed over me.

There was such a passion in his voice. I could hear his soul in those words as he prayed over me with the start of every morning. I could feel his love through the sound of his voice. And for a boy who had experienced the rejection of a person who was supposed to love me no matter what; that was heaven on earth. It was in those moments I knew I had a father. I knew that my father was praying for me to my Abba... my G-d.

Now that I'm grown and on my own I still roll over in the morning and dream of hearing my father lifting me up in his prayers. The sound of my father's voice still wakes me up. No matter how far away, no matter where I have gone or where I'm going, my father's prayers still echo in my ears. That love, the love that healed my childhood wounds, it still lives in my heart to this very day.

"Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it."

Proverbs 22:6

My father may not have known that I was listening to those words in the early morning hours. He may have not known that in his devotion he was showing me how I should live. His compassion, his empathy, his love for others; all of these things he was sowing in my heart and soul. His faith was being passed along. And though both of us have had our battles to hold onto our faith, the resolve that he was showing in those moments of dedication was passed down along with his words. 

In the smallest of moments, in the times when we think we are alone, we are often affecting the lives of others in ways we will never know. My father's morning prayers were those small moments that turned into most momentous of times in my life. And though they were done in the hours just before the light of day, those prayers ushered out the darkness of night in my young life. Those words set me on the path that has carried me to this day. 

In Proverbs G-d shows us that we are to train up our children in H-s way. This means that even in those times when we don't think we are being watched, listened to, or looked up at... we are meant to take these small and fleeting moments to continue that training. It is in these moments that we can either be a hindrance or a blessing. And no matter which one we choose the results will be without measure. The affect we have on the future is after all recorded by the lives our children and their children carry forth long after we ourselves are long gone.