In prayer, I’m looking at loving and being loved. The Lord spoke and said ‘’you’ve said for years, ‘hurt people, hurt people’ well, ‘loved people, love people and they love with a reflection of how they themselves have been loved.’” That seemed true to me.
I closed my eyes in prayer and instantly saw the living and life giving Air, flowing in currents through my life and around me. It was beautiful but a bit different than the sky or the air in the room.
For one thing, it had an intentionality to it. It chose where it went. For another, it actually penetrated where it wanted to penetrate. It didn’t just bump into a person or a thing. If it chose, it simply entered and flowed through. Some it went around, some people and objects it moved on through.
As I looked, I saw this wonderful force wasn’t alone. It wasn’t quite pure. It wasn’t really transparent, rather translucent. It carried specks of material that I realised weren’t original to it and weren’t supposed to be there. Irregular, light diffusing particles. The air seemed to know it carried these pollutants and while not exactly in it’s best form, it carried these particles on with it as if the alternative of not flowing was simply not an option.
I thought ‘this is like a smokey day outside.’ The reason smoke can be seen is the pollutants it carries aloft. It may add colour to the sunsets or even be a bit of a sunscreen on a hot day, it’s effect on our life’s systems is always health altering.
I was made to know, in that instant, that the life giving Air was, of course, the Love of God carried into our own world’s by the Holy Spirit. The specks and particles were the debris that rose from the fires in our own lives, past and present. Those places that had been burnt and destroyed. The misunderstandings and misapplications of love in our many relationships. These things taint us and in the tainting, they affect how we love others.
It struck me as inevitable, that no matter how I loved others with what I thought was the purest love of God, it was still flavoured with my own smoke; that the only way to purify what flowed into and through me was to allow that love, within, to put my own flames down, once and for all. To not just manage my own pain’s flame but put completely the embers out, lest once again, with life’s right fuel, they re-ignite into flame and I start fire suppression all over again.
I close by reminding myself that a things nature, carries into it’s future. Flawed materials and designs break down and fail in their replication. In the same way, God’s Spirit, in his perfection, purifies us and our lives as He flows in, around and through. He doesn’t break down and He is not diminished.
It remains true, that for the moment, our love may be less than perfect and so temporarily, have less than ifs best effect as we pass it on but the better part of His love carries the day. He gives life and hope to all in the moment and reminds us that one day we will breath the completely pure breath of God again. It’s right here within us.
Allow that love free reign into your innermost being, let it do it’s work in you, above all, pass on that purified love. It gives life to all who breath it.