To love the unlovable (Love at second sight!)

Should LOVE be a choice? Or rather, one of those rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights? Like food, safety, shelter, education, clothing, and all other things that satisfy and nourish the flesh, love should be treated as such, just as we treat someone's conscience,  privacy, health, liberty, movement and innocence. 

I believe that we all have a right to love and be loved. Everyone (classified as good and bad people) deserves to be loved. We all yearn for some good loving, but are less bothered by how to love back. What's worse is that we actually feel justified to only love the people that love us first or those we think deserve to be loved according to our worldly (societal) standards. And now with the aid of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp love emoticons, loving has been given a different face.😍❤

A few months ago, I went on a soul search. My own soul, is what came first to mind, and no sooner had I dived into the search, than I realised how crappy my soul had become that I couldn't stand me. The message I saught after was embedded in the mess I found within. I understood why scriptures like "Love your neighbour as you love yourself" only sounded good at a distance. Then 1st Corinthians 13 happened.

How could I have loved anyone as I loved myself if I didn't love me first and yet loving me also had no manuscript. To learn to love me meant to clone myself over a casestudy viewing and learning to bear with all my actions, thoughts, successes, failures, past, present and future. Brethren, this felt like pouring iodine onto a fresh cut. To come face to face with my naked soul was extremely terrifying that only the clothing of God's grace could calm the situation. 

I noticed that there is this guy who sees this soul in its wretched self and rugged clothes every single micro second but loves me unconditionally that he would leave his riches in glory to lay himself down over and over again for me to have life in its abundance.

He whispered to me, "You are more than what you think you are. You are an example of his exceeding grace, a workmanship, master piece, a prize worth boosting over." Now I can say that all good and perfect gifts are from God. He loved me, and in me he planted a garden with loads of fruits, passions, gifts and desires to deliver unto his people. To love him back became automatic that in response to Christ's love, loving all I had a hard time loving became so easy.

Lying naked on the floor, illusioned, ashamed,  disappointed, angry, destroyed, condemned, insecure, betrayed, persecuted gave me a new vision of what could possibly be beyond the horizons. Love needs no qualifier but if it ever does, it should be that we were loved first.

When no one felt deserving, Grace became our qualifier. 

In the words of Leo Tolstoy, "Everything I know, I know because of love." Live and act in love, give that "streetchild" a big hug, kiss that prisoner's forehead goodbye, tell your neighbour that you love them and pat yourself on the back everyday regardless and before you correct every wrong out there, do it in love. 

#Natukunda (He Loves Us)

I Live In My Gift Box!

This morning I woke up to a box neatly wrapped and placed outside my door. Being raised in an optimistic society, my first instinct was that it must be something spectacular considering the kind of wrapping it had. Well, my imagination went so wild from who could have dropped it to what must be in it but shortly it was zeroed down to the beautiful wraps. I started to fantasize about the texture and prints of the wraps like I was in a daydream. These wraps had an African fabric touch, a spec of something chic and golden that I was so sure this person knows my heart inside out to the extent that I felt this wrap was tailor-made for me. 

Without notice, I eventually became more attached to it forgetting the actual "gift" it carried. When I normalized out of my daydream, I delicately removed the wraps and perfectly stored them in my "jewel box." I can't even count all the gift boxes and wrappers I have kept with me because they glittered more than the gold that in fact they became an actual representation of the gift itself. Sometimes, due to their glittering nature, like a child, I am tempted to find them more worthy..... Don't judge me! As they lay in this jewel box, they are nothing but trash and sooner than later, long forgotten for they already served their purpose.

At the end of the day I reflected on words from a special friend of mine. She said, "our bodies are a hard ware of the spirit in us which ideally is a soft ware of our being/ physical structures." This reminded me of my wrappers. Most of us are often caught up nourishing our bodies and never to give a damn about our spiritual being, that we relate with others basing on what they look like, spend the rest on our lives concerned about the kind of food we eat, the clothes we wear and so on while leaving our soft ware to the fitting of society and never making it a first priority.

Nature has allowed us to live in the moment and let life unfold itself. A week ago I was taught that living is in a single breath and that life has been designed as a gift to us with our individual name tags worth treasuring every single second of our existence but not so much to the extent that we get absorbed in it and forget to live. 

Sometimes, our parents, siblings, friends or neighbors may get the kind of gifts we wished for or dreamed of, but fact remains, their gifts are theirs and ours are ours. Everyone gets exactly what they need and can afford. God won't give us more than we can contain. But if my neighbor was handed a video play station he didn't know how to use, it's prudent that I share my skills, the best way I know how, hoping that his game won't stay idle in the gift box forever. However, the giver of this life won't hand unto us a gift he knows we can't figure out, or one that we may loathe because even if he is a mystery God, he is a good father and  always faithful.