Deploying love

Who is the one that can deploy love when life is seemingly unmanageable and feels all consuming?

Thoughts at 3:20 am in the mt hood national forest. Sleepless and my body feeling so tired from still recovering from being sick and trying to care for three kids while my wife is home sick.

I’m exhausted. But laying awake in bed I’m revisited by this circulating thought: Anyone can love when it’s easy.

When it’s all working out.

Anyone can have faith when things are going your way.

Anyone can be a good dad when their kids are listening.

Anyone can stay sober or on whatever difficult path they’ve chosen they know is right for them when it’s effortless.

But when the pain is intense and the times are inconvenient and you’re eating shit and negotiating with yourself to quit and everything seems against you. That’s when the breakthrough can really happen.

That’s when you enter the realm of miracles.

That’s when you become an authority on something. Not when you’ve been untested and unscathed.

So how do we get this?

By expanding our tolerance and capacity to love which comes from widening and deeping our ability to sit with, accept, and work through our pain.

I was introduced to the concept of the pain chamber by Phil Stutz.

The idea that with reps and tools to face pain and difficulty head on we can increase our capacity to hold it without it sloshing out all over those around us when it feels too much to bear.

I’m acutely aware of my lack in this area as a parent and at work.

I often want to do what’s easiest. Tackle the stuff that is not so important but seemingly urgent, like the lowest value of return in the Eisenhower matrix (look this up if you haven’t heard of it).

But I want to grow.

In love. In faith. In generosity. In compassion and mental clarity and my ability to accept what I can’t change, change what I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

And I believe, after confronting my seasonal demons of procrastination, addiction and lack of courage, that this can only come from God.

Not by abdicating responsibility for one’s life, but by letting go of the illusion of control. Over and over.

Deploying love when and to it seems least motivating to do so is when the real work begins.

Like in endurance and long distance fitness, its miles and miles in before the real race begins. When everyone starts to click into that mode of doubt, ceaseless mind chatter, and a body that wants to quit.

But surviving one act of deploying love when it’s most difficult is the path to a life that becomes a tapestry of hard things overcome.

And in the end, all things end. All things die. All things that seem too much and that will last an eternity come to a close.

And choosing love and courage will be the difference between a life that feels abundant or not.