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Can True Love Be Blind?

I was walking the halls of a church in another town recently, when a man ran into me and knocked me off balance. I whipped around to see an elderly gentleman wearing dark sunglasses who was being led around by the arm of his wife. I knew he must be blind.

Jim was a gifted athlete growing up, and in the late 1960s, he was about to be recruited to play professional baseball. Unfortunately, like many young men during that era, his country asked him to place his dreams aside. He was drafted by the army to fight in the Vietnam War.

Jim agreed.

Jim was trained.

Jim deployed to the battlefield.

In the midst of a heated firefight, a bomb exploded a few feet from him inflicting terrible wounds. When he awoke in a foreign hospital, he was informed that the blast had stolen his eyesight and most of his hearing. But hope still found its way into Jim’s troubled life.

As a compassionate nurse cared for his wound, they became fast friends and eventually fell in love. After the war, they married. She stuck by her marriage vows—caring for him, loving him, and reading him stacks of textbooks to help him earn two PhDs.

Nearly four decades later, she leaders her soldier around by the hand and Jim can’t talk about his darling nurse without being gripped by emotion.

“I love my wife,” Jim says, “even though I’ve never seen her.”

That day, I was knocked back by the living embodiment of 1 Peter 1:8:

“Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and even though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.”

Following Jesus is often filled with doubt, anxiety, and dispassion. We strain to grasp our Savior, but touch only the hem of His robe. We squint to see Him, but catch only a glimpse of His back. We call out to Him, and only hear the faintest echoes of his voice. Or perhaps nothing at all.

And yet we choose to love Him still. To believe though blind.

This is a special kind of love, I think. And when we engage in it, we all become Jims—led around by the arm of One we’ve not yet seen, but one day will.

Editor’s Note: The image above was quoted from here.

February 1, 2013by Jonathan
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You are not what you have.

You are not what people say about you.

You are a beloved child of God.

You are infinitely valuable, deserving of dignity, and in possession of gifts that this world needs.

Be you.

Be loved.

Be free.

H/T - Henri Nouwen’s three lies of identity // 📸: @curatedworldphotos
  • “Love is a temporary madness.

It erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.

And when it subsides, you have to make a decision.

You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.

Because this is what love is.

Love is not breathlessness. It is not excitement. It is not the promulgation of eternal passion.

That is just being “in love,” which any fool can do.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away. And this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Those that truly love, have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.” - Louis de Bernières // #gettingmerida
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To the abandoned and the abused.

To the depressed and disappointed.

To the heartbroken and heartsick.

To the beat up, the beat down, the broken, the burned, and the betrayed.

To all those who liberally gave love to people who didn’t deserve it, who didn’t handle your heart with care.

To those who have waited a thousand nighttimes for love to arrive and are still empty handed.

Happy Valentine’s Day to YOU. Today, may you be seen and known.

You are worthy of the love you long for.

TAG SOMEONE WHO NEEDS TO BE REMINDED THAT THEY ARE LOVED. 📸: @zed.910
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Even still, there are many of us who embrace the ancient practice of discernment and are able to speak that holy phrase: “I don’t know.” In such a time, unleashing that utterance is courageous not cowardly.

Good luck to all of you wrestling crocodiles today!

Image: @jmesch // #speakgodbook
  • “One day, everything will go back to the way it was,” he told himself.

But, just then, he remembered that new dreams are far better than dead ones.

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“If we wake up to our current realities and return to our foundations... the faith's best days may yet lie ahead.” Jonathan Merritt, The Atlantic

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