We spend so much time searching for love. It’s as if we imagine love as this something we hold in our back pockets until we find the perfect someone to give it to.
With hard work, we can accomplish anything. Accomplishments are the natural outcomes of a series of positive choices. Our possessions and accolades are our gifts to ourselves, our rewards for all of our hard work.
Love, on the other hand, isn’t something we choose for ourselves. Love is a divine gift. The only choice we have in the matter is whether to remain in love or not.
A good way of explaining my theory would require you to imagine love as a boat or ship that sails throughout life picking couples up and carrying them away. In this depiction, no one is more responsible for being in love than the other. As I mentioned, the two are just picked up. Once inside, the ship immediately begins transforming the two into grander versions of themselves. Gradually, they come to understand why they were chosen to be within love together.
The love ship is an amazing vehicle capable of transporting any two people as far as they’re willing to travel together. And the passengers, by virtue of staying within the ship, give love total access to all of their deepest fears, dreams, hopes and abilities. The waters are sometimes rough, but with love you will always find calm waters. With love leading the way, the journey is generally a fulfilling one, one that constantly introduces you to more of your potential. That is, of course, until one of the two passengers decides he or she no longer want to be in love and wishes to exit the ship (relationship).
There are infinite reasons why one might decide to exit love. However, most reasons essentially boil down to an unwillingness to be led by love, an unloving choice that later makes being in love difficult or a desire to move in a different direction.
Being in love requires trust, a sort of separateness from outsiders, and an unending excitement about the journey ahead. We can say the words and go through the motions of being in love. However, authentic love is a result of a very spiritual offering and a physical acceptance. The possibilities of what you and another can be is what has brought or drawn love to you.
Sometimes the intangible presence of love, the special feeling you get when the other is present, isn’t convincing enough. Many people shake it off as merely their vain imagination, and in these cases the love ship never sets sail. This is the difference between having love and being in love.
Sure, a person can enter into love’s ship alone. However, the ship cannot sail without the other passenger. We are often afraid of the unknown, and, as a result, choose not to enter into love with those with whom we find love most naturally. We see only the surface of what’s possible.
Those who give us that “feeling” may sometimes arrive in a form we can’t imagine being in love with. And although we feel love when they’re present, we run. We run because we don’t want to be carried away with someone with whom we couldn’t imagine or see ourselves being happiest with, or worse, someone that others wouldn’t feel comfortable seeing us float away with.
This fear-based choice causes us to later construct a generic version of a love ship. The manmade ship does not provide the same powers because the love we manufacture for ourselves can go well for a while but will always be limited to the power and capability of man and often fails the test of time. On the contrary, real love is not only natural, it’s supernatural, and its power is unmatched. So when experiencing real love, two people can become and see more than they ever imagined possible.
If we all could only accept the power of love, everyone would be somewhere sailing and sharing life with someone who’s equally willing to be with a part of the greatest miracle of human experience: love. But unfortunate reality is the greatest version of what we can be is locked inside a choice many of us will never make, a choice to trust, be lead and inspired by love and love alone.
Staci Cook is a junior public relations student from Tallahassee. Her goal is to found three service organizations in the areas of education, entrepreneurship and health and fitness. She plans to write self-help books and travel the world as a faith-based motivational speaker. Cook is currently writing her first book entitled, “STACI: Seeing Things As Christ Intends!”