“We are here to learn to endure the beams of love"

William Blake once wrote, “We are here to learn to endure the beams of love”. Over this past year, I think I am finally beginning to understand what that means.

It is truly an act of cruelty when someone attacks a friend where they are most vulnerable. It is truly a shame when someone has been so unloved in their life that when someone genuinely loves them, the only thing they know how to do is cut them down and push them away.

Being loved is about as hard as it is to actually love someone. True love is not contained to your favorite Paul Newman or Robert Redford films—true love can’t be contained at all. True love is giving, no matter what. A girl I once loved told me “I don’t understand why you love me, I don’t deserve it”—and she was right—she didn’t deserve it. But that’s the reality and the beauty of agape love: none of us deserve it.

Being undeserving of love, but still being loved, is one of the most fragile yet overwhelmingly powerful feelings that exist in this world. It is something that has the potential to break down walls and to change peoples lives forever—if they let it.

“We are here to learn to endure the beams of love”

I heard someone speaking a few weeks ago, and they were saying that some times people won’t accept love. That no matter how much you or I care about someone, they will reject, push away, and destroy something that shines light into their life. And that is the risk of loving someone with agape love—that in their reality, they don’t want, or otherwise need love.

C.S. Lewis once said "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".

Being vulnerable is the reality of love. Being vulnerable is how we learn to endure the beams of love, and then eventually, how we learn to love.

A thought crushed my mind one morning, and it was that some people will refuse to be loved. Some people will never learn how to endure the beams of love, and they will lock their heart up until it truly becomes “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable”.

The people that just wanted to love them become the broken and the forsaken, left with nothing because we gave everything to show them what it means to be loved. We must learn to endure though, we must learn to forgive the fact that, as Lydia says in their song “Now the One You Once Loved Is Leaving” that, “It’s not your fault that no one taught you how…now the one you once loved is leaving”. We can’t hold all the blame to people who, for whatever reason, were never taught how to accept love, and how to return love.

We love from a distance, we love until we forget names and places and dates, we love until we can forgive them, we love realizing that sometimes people will reject it and cut us down for it, we are vulnerable even though we know some people will exploit and belittle us. We survive off of the love our friends--because we’re all in this together.

We love because Love first loved us.

True Love Will Find You in the End (unedited BG News article)

This is the unedited version of my editorial that ran in the BG News today, parts were changed to be put in the newspaper because of the rights that Daniel Johnston's song has. This is what you should've had in your hands today.

People who think holiday’s like Valentines Day and Sweetest Day make people realize how much they wish they were romantically loved don’t know what they’re talking about. People who think holiday’s like Valentines Day makes people feel alone also don’t know what they’re talking about.

The people that feel alone don’t feel alone only when major holidays occur. People who have been hurting the same heart since they were ten don’t need one day a year to remind them how much it hurts to be love someone who decides that you’re not worth their love--need it be a father, mother, brother, sister, former or current romantic partners.

If you feel alone, unloved, neglected, abused—whether it be today, once a year, twice a month, seemingly every day of your life, print and cut out this poem by Daniel Johnston (although I prefer Matthew Good’s cover version better, and then I just recorded my own version of it) and put it somewhere you will constantly see it. I’ve read a lot of poetry and lyrics, and few comfort me like Johnston’s hope of “True love will find you in the end”.

I truly believe that true love will find you and me in the end, if we are truly and earnestly seek it and know how to love ourselves. Lord knows what’s worth having and hurting over in this world if not Love.

“True love will find you in the end

You'll find out just who was your friend

Don't be sad, I know you will,

But don’t give up until

True love will find you in the end

This is a promise with a catch

Only if you're looking can it find you

Cause true love is searching too

But how can it recognize you

Unless you step out into the light

Don't be sad I know you will

But don’t give up until

True love finds you in the end.”

- Daniel Johnston