I have learned this year that you need to accept them as they are and where they are at in the their journey.
Sometimes other people don’t come from love and they may never figure it out in this lifetime. And if they do, they will have to come to terms with their past hurtful behaviors and it will be painful for them, so we need to love them even in their bad behavior.
Meanwhile, I am learning to trust in the way love works, slowly and over time, and the power that it holds. Every once in a while I catch of glimpse of how love “works” and it is impressive, but also very intimate, so you don’t see it often.
Love takes its time but I do believe that it always wins in the end. How can it not? Our cells are wired to respond to love. So I have decided to never stop chipping away, even with the people who are armored up.
Everything happens in its own time, and everyone softens when they are ready and not a second before.
It took me a long time to figure this quote (below) out, I sat with it for months… and maybe I don’t quite have it yet because I’m still sitting with part of it, but it speaks so well to how love “works”.
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything” -Thomas Merton
There is a balance between accepting “them” for who they are and allowing them to travel their path even when it hurts us, and to never stop believing in the ways love works. We have to wait patiently… very very patiently… for the love to find a crack in their shell and start doing its thing. And although we may never see the “results” you can always trust that the in “value, the rightness, and the truth of the work” when you are looking for a way that love can win.
Surrender to what is. let go of what was. have faith in what will be.” – Sonia Ricotti