Article December 12, 1988 Issue

To love and be loved

Don't we all want to be loved? I did! But first I had to learn some important lessons about what love really is.

Written for the Sentinel

May I tell you how prayer turned my life completely around from lies and emptiness to the ability to love and be loved? While I was in grade school, I discovered that all I had to do to make others like me was to like them. I mistakenly figured that to be happy, I had to make others happy! This theory sounds legitimate because it seems to have all the elements of love, but it does not put God, Love, into the picture at all. It presumes that the source of love is a human being. It is as though one person said to another, "I will fill you up, if you will fill me up."

Through my school years I seemed so taken by this attempt to please everyone that I found myself being silly and wild, telling small lies and feeling empty. I went to the Christian Science Sunday School, where I was very sincere in wanting to know about God. But there was always this false concept of love to contend with.

In college I felt desperate. My parents went through a divorce, and all family support seemed gone. God was just a word to me. It was to people that I turned for love and not to God as Love. I imagined the many ways that I could help people and how grateful they would be for what I would do for them.

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