The simpicity and hope of a love that pours from a humble heart, from a heart that knows its own darkness

Are there things you do that you wish you hadn't? Do you repeat the same mistake a few days or weeks later? I do. How does that happen? Leslie Leyland Fields forgot the danger of walking along an Alaskan beach, and got swept up in a wave. She writes,

How had I forgotten the danger there, the darkness, the force that can slay others, slay myself, when I see it true?

‘O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbor With your crooked heart.’

I realized, this is all I have, a crooked heart.

This is all you have, a crooked heart.

Knowing this, we can drown in our own salt tears — or we can love one another more.

I choose more.

I was swept by another wave just two days later. On Sunday I was part of a drama troupe that enacted “The Love Chapter,” perhaps the most beautiful and most famous words about love ever written. “Perfect love is not proud, it is not self-seeking, it does not boast, it does not envy, it does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth . . . True love hopes, believes, endures all things…”

As I spoke and enacted these words on stage with people in my church—-giving food to a hungry man, bending down to tie a boy’s shoe, giving another my coat, I was nearly drowned with the simplicity and hope of this love—a love that pours from a humble heart, from a heart that knows its own darkness.

Text and photo by Leslie Leyland Fields, and you can read her full post here: http://www.aholyexperience.com/2013/03/dispatch-from-a-near-drowning-and-a-love-note-to-self-loathers /