Love & Miracles – How to Get More Love & Miracles in Your Life

Love & Miracles – How to Get More Love & Miracles in Your Life

Love and Miracles. Two of the greatest subjects on earth and two of my favorite things. People who know me well know that I am a big fan of doing all things in love and that I have received many miracles in my life. Do an internet search on the word “love” and you will get over 17 Billion hits. Seventeen Billion. The word “miracles” on the other hand would only get you roughly 106 million hits. Most people want love in their lives yet don’t recognize the very things they are doing to repel love. Miracles on the other hand are a concept that are simply too far-fetched for some people to believe in. This post is about how to get more love and miracles in your life.

How Is Love Defined?

Let’s start with LOVE. The definitions of love include – strong affection for another rising out of kinship or personal ties; maternal love for a child; attraction based on sexual desire; affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests; a warm attachment, enthusiasm, or devotion; the object of attachment; a beloved person; unselfish loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another; a score of zero in tennis; and so on. Going back to Sophocles, an ancient Greek tragedy play writer (Born c.496 BCE-died 406), whose quote “One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.” has been passed on for thousands of years to the present day. Artist Vincent van Gogh is quoted as saying “The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” Love Watercolor Painting Copyright 2019 by Lisa A. Lundy No discussion about Love would be complete without mentioning the relationship between Love and God. It is said that God is Love. Besides the word Love being mentioned in the Bible 310 times, Love is the basis for the Catholic Religion, as well as several other religions although I can only definitively mention the Catholic religion because I am not schooled in the other faiths. You are commanded to Love your neighbor as yourself, and forgive someone seventy times seven times (or about 490 times). Recognizing that God loves us enough to give up His only begotten Son for the salvation of our souls and to save us from sin could be a healing property for someone who believed that. Belief that we can be forgiven by Jesus Christ and God for our sins is another avenue of self-acceptance and healing that religion offers. The context that the Catholic religion offers for suffering can be empowering in difficult times as well. In fact, having religious beliefs and practices can function as a coping mechanism in life – and that’s very powerful. The Bible quotes on love are so common that you can find them on coffee mugs, wall art, t-shirts, and tote bags among other things. A few popular Bible quotes on Love include: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” John 15:12 “And now these three remains: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”       1Corinthians 13:13 “Do everything in love.” 1 Corinthians 16:14 Love songs are very popular just as break-up songs, those songs about the ending of love, are. There endless movies about love. There are both books and novels about love. We even have stamps that bear the word “LOVE” on them. Love is ubiquitous. Love means being able to say these three things: I am sorry; I made a mistake; and I was wrong. Love means being vulnerable, open, courageous, and willing to be rejected. It means being authentic. It means being compassionate and empathetic with yourself and others. Love means having your heart open to receive love and it means loving yourself. Love means wanting the best for the other person, respecting them and appreciating them as they are. Love is all things good and it requires vulnerability, which is well summarized in this famous C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) quote: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” C.S. Lewis from The Four Loves Metal Sign made by Nick Spicer of Scrapped, Julian, PA (814)470-2489 Since Love is an all-pervasive concept in our world and has been since the early days of man, then why is love so elusive for some people? There are many reasons why LOVE is difficult for some people. Sometimes one bad break-up is enough for a person to withdraw from love. Sometimes it is the culmination of a series of events that have people armor up and close themselves off from love. There is a variety of reasons and circumstances why some find love elusive.

Obstacles to Having Love

This is my list of some of the obstacles for having love in your life. Remembering that I am not a therapist in any way, it’s just my observations and beliefs about why it is so difficult for some people to have and keep love in their lives. Anything from this list would be the basis for growth and development. If there is something holding you back from having love present in your life – get to work.

1. Low self-esteem
2. Brittleness
3. Righteousness
4. Being Judgmental
5. Being closed
6. Unwilling to be vulnerable
7. Fear of rejection or hurt
8. Negative attitude
9. Thinking you are better than everyone else
10. Too rigid in your thinking
11. Unwilling to accept other peoples’ imperfections
12. Expecting/demanding too much
13. Poor communication skills
14. Low emotional quotient
15. Lack of integrity
16. Addictions
17. Not loving yourself
18. Blaming others
19. Shaming others
20. Lack of boundaries
21. Unable to receive love (damaged from the past)
22. Other psychopathology/neurosis/narcissism/psychopaths/sociopaths
23. Exploiting/Using others
24. Being the victim
25. Believing that you do not deserve love (not good enough or other similar belief pattern)

Reusable Grocery Store Bag sold to benefit a local charity – LOVE THIS! Some people have been so hurt or damaged by their past either in childhood or adulthood that they simply can’t take the risk of being hurt again. While that is understandable, given what we know about the neuroplasticity and neurogenesis of the brain, the hurts and wounds from the past can be healed. It’s called doing the work. If you want more love in your life then doing the work of personal growth and development will help you get there. Since the entire point of my blog is to help you LOVE your LIFE, you will find many other tools to help you get love into your life in my past blog posts. To have LOVE in your LIFE- you have to live life – play full out, start making friends, get out there and do things.

Miracles

The connection between Love and Miracles, in my humble opinion of course, is that I believe you must have Love to have Miracles. Just my opinion, which I am owning. As the recipient of many miracles over my lifetime, Miracles are another favorite topic of mine. Let’s start by getting on the same page about what a miracle is and then I’ll give you some examples before the process to get miracles to show up in your life. Miracles are defined as: an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs; an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment; and a divinely natural phenomenon experienced humanly as the fulfillment of spiritual law. I have been blessed by so many miracles, some of which would not be appropriate to write about given the involvement with other people. The most well-known miracle of my life started when I asked my Mom to give me a sister, this after she was probably only a few weeks post-partem, which is never a good idea. My mother said that I would never be getting a sister, so my 5-year old retort to that was to put my hand on my hip and toss my head while saying, “Well, then I’ll just pray to God.” Upon her approval that it was okay to pray to God for a sister, I did that for seven consecutive years. Night after night. Year after year. With such conviction that God would never let me down. I was relentless. Kind classmates and relatives tried to soften the blow that I would never get a sister with various statements, but I persisted. Just before I turned 13 years old, after 7 solid years of prayer, I received my sister! That’s roughly 2,555 days of prayer just in case you were wondering. Have all my prayers been answered affirmatively? Clearly if I am 58 years old and starting over with pretty much nothing, no they have not. Yet, am I totally amazed at my life and the miracles that I have received over the years? Absolutely. I am one very, very lucky woman. I was told that I would have a hysterectomy and thus never be able to have children due to a 19-centimeter fibroid tumor in my uterus. Due to the fibroid tumor being 8 times larger than my uterus itself the surgeon felt that a hysterectomy would be the only way to get all of the tumor out. The short version is that the lining of the uterus and a paper-thin layer of tissue was preserved during the surgery, which was the first miracle in this situation. The second miracle of this circumstance is that my uterine tissue grew back to be normal in thickness and health, which is significant because uterine tissue is NOT regenerative. So, I was able to have children against all odds because of these two combined miracles. Due to the extensive scar tissue it did mean that my children were born early and by C-Section to avoid labor complications. I consider it a miracle that I landed on 3^rd Floor Hoyt Hall as a freshman at Penn State University where I had the best Resident Assistant (R.A.) ever and made the most loving, supportive, and all-around amazing friends, 6 or more of whom I am still friends with today. How does that happen? People have been telling me over the past year plus that it is a miracle that I have come out of dealing with 3 concurrent traumas over the past 20 years as a very happy and healthy person. I don’t know if that is a miracle or not, but people seem to be pretty certain that it is. One miracle I experienced had nothing to do with me or my family or actually anyone that I personally knew. I was at an event where I heard some people I knew talking about a very sick man in the hospital and how the next morning they were going to remove his ventilator and that he would simply pass away. I don’t know why, but I intervened in the conversation and said that I believed that the man could wake up, sit up in bed and start talking when the ventilator and life support was removed. Oh, the looks that I got in that moment. They said, you don’t understand. You have not seen him. He’s never going to make it and that is never going to happen. So, the way it went was that one of the women pointed at me and said, well, if that happens Lisa, I will call you right away. I prayed for this man I didn’t know that evening and the next morning I got the call that he woke up, he sat up and talked once the life support equipment was removed. I call this “Holding the Space” for miracles. As I dig into the steps to bring miracles into your life, part of it is your belief that a miracle could happen or holding the space for it to occur.

How to Have More Miracles in Your Life

1. Unwavering Faith – the size of a mustard seed-As the Bible says if you have faith the size of a mustard seed (1-2 millimeters in size, much smaller than a pea), then you can move a mountain. Matthew 17:20: “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard see, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible.” Faith is complete trust or confidence in something or someone.
2. Resolute Belief/Holding the space-It could be said that this is just another way of saying faith because the definition of belief includes the word faith. In this instance I use resolute belief and holding the space as you can see the miracle coming to you. You can feel the miracle in your heart. You are holding the space for the miracle to occur if that makes any sense to you. And it is fine if it does not.
3. Prayer -Continuous/On-going-As God is Our Father in Heaven, HE hears all of our prayers and petitions. That does not mean that he answers all of them or gives us what we want. For miracles to occur, it is best to engage in continuous prayer. If you get bored with the prayers that you know, then you can always take on, as I did some years ago with my children, the task of learning new prayers. There are many rich prayers worth committing to heart. My most recent one is the “Mary, Undoer of Knots” prayer.
4. Fasting – Can boost your prayer results-Fasting is said to be a way to boost your prayer results and as such is included here. What fasting looks like is limiting the hours in any given day where you will eat food, say between 10 AM and 6 PM (an 8-hour window) eating one regular sized meal with two smaller meals, no snacks. Best done with no sugar or sweets. Obviously done with prayer. I would suggest a Novena, which is a 9-day prayer.
5. Look for Miracles-Miracles are not always the thing that slap you in the face. Sometimes you have to sit back, ponder your life and actually look with introspection at what has happened to see the miracles that you have been given. At least that is how it seems to me. Sometimes the totality of the miracle is not evident until you really look at your life. If you are not looking for miracles then for sure you will never see one.

Concluding Thoughts:

I am thankful now, looking back over my life, that God said NO to some of my prayers and petitions without getting into detail. Life is so much richer with LOVE. Life is so much better with LOVE. Yes, love of any kind means risk and the potential for getting hurt. The more you work on yourself the more resilient you will become and you will come to understand that if God is in your life in a meaningful way, that things have a way of working out. Have faith. Pray. Do the things that heal your heart. Believe that you are deserving of God’s love and thus HIS miracles of love. I want to leave you with a quote from “The Velveteen Rabbit”, first published in 1922 on becoming real: “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” ― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit My wish for you is that you are real and well loved. My wish for you is a happy life filled with people who love you and whom you love. My wish for you is that you is that you can grow and develop in such a way that you know how to live an empowered life even in hard times. How can I help you on your journey?
Love,
Lisa