You stand there looking at a painting trying to embrace what it’s truly saying, yet you struggle to find the words. Somehow, it’s elusive; something intangible, alluring, tantalising. You can’t stop gazing into the hues, the lines, the mystique. You step backward and away. You draw closer, trying to establish perspective.
The image you’re looking at is your life. You see two equal but opposite images, which seem to give a 3D perspective that is hard for the eye to grasp; those opposites are the depths of the hopes of intimacy with your loved ones together with the impossibility of redeeming that intimacy in the most complete sense.
What’s so intransigent is the distance between the love we aspire to give and receive and the love we’re able to give and receive.
It’s only when we stand at a funeral of a loved one that the full height, breadth and depth of love in life is known and it overwhelms us.
It sweeps over us like a tsunami, wave upon incessant wave pounds against us.
We see at one and the same time, what we wanted, what we craved WITH what we were not able to give or did not receive.
It’s acknowledging this, in the moments before that funeral, that we have a vision for what is not yet too late to do: to love with a love that does not fail in its quest to redeem that future moment.
Can I be frank? We literally exist for our wives and husbands, for our daughters and sons, for our mothers and fathers — to get love right there, first and foremost (and I do realise, sadly, this may be beyond your control in your personal circumstances) — and that there is nothing else that counts from that funeral-moment perspective.
If only we looked back from the funeral perspective a little more. We might be the sons and daughters God is calling us to be. We might live with open hands and a softer heart; be the best brothers and sisters we can be. We might keep shorter account in all our close relationships, as far as that’s possible, because in many circumstances it’s not just up to us.
It’s when I’m apart from my son that my heart aches to be with him, but it’s when I’m with him that I’m sometimes impatient with him. Life is like that a lot, isn’t it? We don’t want it to be like this, but this is life.
No matter how we feel about a person, our interacting with them is always clouded by many factors, and there are usually many distractions to the deeper affection we have for them.
Making the most of now can seem impossible unless we look back from an event where people will be celebrating our life, but we won’t be there with them. Only now do we have the ability to do what we can do now — love with every breathe, heartbeat, sinew and vein.
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash
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