Living in Love

By James Dillet Freeman
Excerpt from Unity Magazine, February 1994

Love is not only beautiful and romantic and spiritual. Love is also earthly and demanding. Love may lift you up as on wings but also it may bring you down onto your hands and knees and demand that you do the hardest and most menial tasks.

Most of us believe that love is romantic and beautiful, the sort of things poets write poems about and singers sing songs about. Most of us do not believe that love has much practical value. We think it would be foolish to manage a business or handle a job or run a government or conduct our usual life by it. In this world, we have to look out for ourselves.

But when do we do our best work? Is there anything we do better or more successfully than the things we love to do?

When are you the happiest—when you are doing things you don't like to do or when you are doing things you love to do? Is it not when our heart and mind and life are full of love that life becomes what we would really like it to be all the time? Why can't it be this way all the time? We have only to love—and this is what it becomes.

We tell ourselves that love is hard because love asks us to give. Sometimes it asks us to give all, but the truth is that it is not the life of love that is hard. The truth is that life is hard when we don't love. When life has no love in it, it is a miserable life where we drag our laggard steps from weary task to task.
A life that is love's is the only life worth living, and any life that is less than love's is a lesser life.

Beauty, truth, and love—
These three form life's holiest trinity …
Of all that we may find on earth
Nothing else has so much worth
As beauty, truth, and love—these three
Give meaning to the mystery.

James Dillet Freeman's poems have touched the hearts of millions of people. He has been published in The New Yorker and in books by Harper & Row, Doubleday, and Unity House®. Freeman was also well known for his popular “Life Is a Wonder” column in Unity Magazine from which this article is excerpted. To learn more about Unity Magazine, click here.

To find more publications by James Dillet Freeman, click here.

Comments

Login to post a comment

LIFE IS FOR LOVING

We are conditioned to view life through an exterior lens, meaning it's out there somewhere? We think that whatever we seek is outside of ourselves. Many of us believe we came into this world with little. We grew up, went to schools and universities and moved out into the world to get filled by education, money, relationships and of course love. That?s what we?re supposed to do, right? We seek people out to love us, particularly that "special someone." For years I had been brainwashed by greeting cards, romantic movies and books and eventually came to believe that love would come naturally. I erroneously believed that if I found the right person to love or the right person to love me my life would be complete. And yet we know that love is not out there. On an innate level we know that within each of us is that desire to be love, to express the Infinite Power of love that flows through us. We know that love is not a commodity, a thing to be bartered, borrowed, given or taken away, but rather it is that process that moves through us in our attitudes, our words and our actions. So today I invite you into the activity of loving. I intend to "fall in love" with loving. I am renewing my commitment to this. I do this by taking the principles of divine love, rolling up my sleeves and creating a laboratory of loving. I learned to walk by walking, I learned to write by writing, and I have learned to love by loving. I practice being vulnerable, seeing with the eyes of God, accepting you as you are, telling the truth about myself, expressing forgiveness between us and by being "in love" with everyone. In the words of Eric Butterworth, "God has work for me to do that no one else can do but me. I am in love with God, and God is in love with me. In this oneness of love, I let His process flow through me, guiding me, directing me, fulfilling me, prospering me." No matter how many times I may look to the outer world for love, or how far I may stray from the principles of loving, everyday I need to just get on with the business of life, because life is for loving.

3/11/2009 10:30:48 PM

How beautiful

I loved reading this article. It was very powerful and provided a very spiritual connection to love.

sabrinakinckle

2/14/2009 4:52:58 PM

-->