To me this means not letting anger, fear, hate, hurt feelings, bitterness, resentment crowd into one's thinking. It means staying mentally aligned with God's goodness regardless of the circumstances.
If we think of God as Love and filling all space and time, then God or Love is the center of all being. To love forward is to commit to loving what is good and true no matter what. To love backward is to bathe every memory, good or bad, in Love’s warm and cleansing light.
When someone shares a neat idea, it’s useful to see how it relates to our own experience. So of course I had to ask, “Can I love forward? Can I commit to just love, no matter what comes down the pike?”
What about backward? Can I love backward? Can I regard with kind and forgiving eye every injustice, misunderstanding, willful word or act?
To choose to love backward is, amazingly, to live in the present moment. It is to courageously take charge of this moment in our life. It’s to decide to be in control of our thinking and to consciously choose a generous attitude. It is to refuse to let another decide whether we are going to be miserable or cheerful, unhappy or pleasant, guilty or innocent.
Loving forward is to send our good-will ahead of our footsteps, ahead of the clock as it were. Loving forward decides ahead of time to make the best of whatever comes. In fact it is to do more than that. Attitude makes all the difference. Loving forward is an expectancy of good and that expectancy often opens thought to recognize good that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
Love, as God, really knows no time, no past no future. Love is now. And that's really all we need to know in order to participate in timeless goodness.
3 comments:
neat post, Sandi.... love the "loving backward" idea.
Laura
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Loving backward met a personal need for something I was praying about this morning. It gave me a new perspective on how to deal with someone's difficult conduct.
this is good -- you should get this published!!!
really.
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