The Reason Love Is Difficult

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Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.  ~Iris Murdoch

God is love.

To love Him is to know Him as completely unlike anybody or any reality, being Reality.

To love our neighbor as we love ourselves means we love them because they are not ourselves, yet are still equally valuable.

For example.

I like cheesecake.

To love you as I love myself doesn’t mean I shove cheesecake down your throat based on the assumption that any SANE person SHOULD NOT ONLY LOVE cheesecake, but find my act of cheese cake shoving intensely loving!

To love you as myself means I accept the kinds of cake YOU like, if you like cakes at all, or even better, that I accept that you may indeed HATE cheesecake, and because of this, I only seek to give you the kind of cake YOU LIKE, just as I’d want to be given the kind of cake I like.

I love you as I want to be loved.

I want to be free to be me.

So I let you be free to be you.

You.

Not me.

God is the ultimate YOU, the ultimate NOT ME.

You are you.

I am me.

I have to accept you as not me to love you truly.