I’m not ready to let go of the theme of Love and Fear quite yet. It feels so important for where we are as a people these days and what we need to feed versus what we must allow to wither away in ourselves.

One of my current favorite teachers on this topic is John Pavlovitz, a Protestant minister who takes a stand every day for the message of love, peace and compassion in Christianity. His blog is called Stuff that Needs to Be Said. In a September 2015 post he wrote,

The older I get, the less concerned I am with getting many things right.
Maybe it’s the wisdom that comes with age or maybe it’s just battle fatigue from too many years
logged in the fight, but lots of stuff that used to matter greatly to me has simply lost its
appeal and relinquished its luster.

These days I don’t care much for having an iron-clad theology or an airtight apologetic or a
sanitized public persona or a perfect family image. I don’t crave prestige or renown or success
or popularity or money, or many of things I grew-up believing were the point of this life. 
Now I only care about getting one thing right….

I want my presence on the planet to result in less pain, less inequality, less poverty, less
suffering, less damage for those sharing it with me. I want the sum total of my efforts to yield
more compassion, more decency, more laughter, more justice, and more goodness than before I
showed up. That’s it.

In other words: I just want to do Love right.…
This is my prayer and purpose and calling. It is the only non-negotiable for my days left
here. …Love is the only acceptable legacy I care to leave the world; not Love covered in
doctrine, not Love couched in religion, not Love loaded down with caveats and conditions and
explanations; just the beautifully potent thing itself, distilled down to its essence and delivered
directly to people as honestly and purely as I can.

I’m not a Christian and don’t believe this belief in Love is particularly the mission of any one religion or way of life. But I’m with John. I felt the call strongly when I read this in 2015 and feel it, even more, today: I just want to do Love right. Living into the how of that is our life’s work.

Written by MJ Ryan, SheEO Development Guide

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