Love knows everything is as it should be. If we are open, love will always lead us to love. No matter how we choose to travel there. Even the hard stuff has given me the gift of learning to love from a deeper place, giving me the opportunity to move higher in love and trust.

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The paths we travel to love can be varied. I have traveled to love through fear, facing some scary and difficult situations. Even though I was afraid, the courage to keep going helped me find love and appreciation for my strength so deep.

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I have traveled to love through sadness, experiencing loss and heartbreak (both romantic and non-romantic) that I thought I would never bounce back from, only to find it had expanded my heart. On the other side of sadness, I gained an immeasurable appreciation for life and an expanded capacity to love. After the tears and the lessons, love renewed me, and I saw the beauty of being able and willing to love so deep that nothing can take it away. Sadness took me down the road of acceptance.

And love itself has been a road.

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I used to think of love only in terms of romantic love and what I wanted from love.

I thought everything stemmed from this kind of love: transactional, never unconditional, always loving but wanting something in return, as if reciprocity were the only way to prove love’s realness.

But love is “authenticity” and does not require anything for it to be real. It just is. We must allow love to show us how to be real, honest, and authentic with ourselves.

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Love is God’s greatest gift to us. We are here to walk in that gift. We were created for that purpose so we can bless ourselves and others. It is our essence. It always has been and will be.

We don’t have to search for love in another, with hopes we can find some for ourselves. We already are LOVE.

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Loving my son so deeply has shown me how unconditional love and acceptance for another, expecting nothing in return, is possible and beautiful. We are always inside of an opportunity that can move us to a place of truth and deep love, if we can see it that way … if we can separate the experience (good or bad) from its purpose to bring us to greater love. We choose the way we travel to love, and love lets us freely move at our own pace and in our own way.

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Being truly you, in love, is your greatest opportunity to serve God. Why? Because you are expanding His light, by your ability to recognize and hold His light in you. Self-love is not selfish. Loving myself bridges the gap between God and me. It closes any separation that I may be holding and fills it up with our oneness. Our first love should be ourselves. The way we love and care for our own hearts is the blueprint for how we will love and care for others.

The love I have for myself plays a role in the way I accept and am open to God’s love for me. I can only let in and give as much as my heart is open to receiving and giving.

There is no better way to receive love than to give it away. (I had to deeply reflect and breathe this in to understand its magnitude.)

There are some who find it hard to believe that God loves them. I have been there. I know what this feels like. Walking the path back to my heart has been the key to understanding how untrue that belief was.The biggest realization I have had about love is that my love is not dependent on someone else’s love for me. I am responsible for being love, for giving love, even in the face of something or someone unloving. This revelation and my continued ability to grow in this have changed my life.

When we love from the parts of us that have yet to be healed, we love in a way that is limited. Heal those parts, and our love for ourselves and others will grow.

Forgiving, believing, caring, goodness, kindness, peace, light, God … all these words mean LOVE.

A quiet and peaceful mind is LOVE.

Guilt, shame, resentment, competition, comparison, jealousy … all keep us away from love.

It is a privilege to LOVE. It is the reward. Just think about how good you feel when you love and expect nothing in return. You have no fear of your heart being broken because you realize that it could never break. Your heart is filled with love. Jesus was here, in physical form, to show us how to love. He modeled it, to show us what pure love is.

Am I living by His example?

Let my heart be open so I am able to witness all the love that is available to me daily. All the love that I have missed, taken for granted, or just been unable to see.Love shows you the other side of things. It allows you to see more than the offense, or the darkness. It frees you up, so you can look and find the light. This makes us stronger, wiser, and our love grows deeper. And eventually, everything we see we will meet with love. Love offers no mistakes; it is corrective, purifying, healing. It offers us opportunities to clear the way so we can see more and feel more.

It gives us more ways to show up, in love. Love is not exclusive; it is all-inclusive.

As I journey closer to my heart and towards my desire to be in alignment with the heart of The Divine, my understanding of His love has expanded and deepened.

Love is the soul and language of God. I shake my head when I think about how little I knew and felt about this gift given to all of us. And then I give thanks for being awakened to the understanding of how sweet, gracious, giving, and complete LOVE is. 

This is how I grew today. May it inspire you in some way.

Words by Marquita Moore